Palantir

The Naturalist's Sensus Divinitatis

2010-03-26T16:48:00.005-04:00

Plantinga asks: What are the odds that, if we are the products of unguided natural selection, our belief-forming mechanisms are reliable? He thinks the odds are quite low and uses this conclusion as part of an argument against atheism.

When asking this question, he asks: would a creature that is the product of unguided natural selection have reliable belief-forming mechanisms?

The answer to this question is 'yes'. We are the products of unguided natural selection. Our beliefs are the product of reliable belief-forming mechanisms. Accordingly, by Lewis' truth conditions for counterfactual conditionals, it is true that were a creature the product of unguided natural selection, it would have reliable belief-forming mechanisms.

BTW: Lewis: "If P were true, Q would be true" is true if P and Q are true.

The (Un)Importance of the Past and the Value for Me of My Life

2010-03-09T11:17:00.004-05:00

At first one thinks that the good and bad in life aggregates across time such that your life has an overall value to you that might be represented as (something like) a sum of a measure of the magnitudes of intrinsic value to which you were subject at each time in your life.

But: It is tempting to suppose that the past does not matter to my wellbeing -- except insofar as it has determined my present or future condition. So, for example, if I should discover that my childhood included a hitherto forgotten trauma, I am not sure I should think that my life is much worse than I thought it was. Or, if I do think this, I will think that its being worse than I thought it was in that way is not such a bad thing. Similarly, if I should discover that my childhood included a hitherto forgotten episode of bliss, I am not sure I should think that my life is much better than I thought it was. Or, if I do think this, I will that think that its being better than I thought it was in that way is not such a good thing.

What if I discover that the universe came into existence only five minutes ago -- as opposed to its coming into existence somewhere before 1974? How should I feel about this discovery? Should I think: in a certain way my life is going to be much shorter than I would have hoped? It is as if I learned that I have an illness that will kill me about 35 years before I would have expected to die. And yet: I find it hard to feel this way about the discovery that the universe came into existence only five minutes ago.

If this is the way I think about the past, then what sense could there be to the idea that the good for me of living aggregates such that there is a value to me of my whole life?

But: it would be a mistake to wholly give in to the temptation to believe that the past does not matter. There are certain things I do care about in the past. These seem to fall into two categories: (1) Facts about my connections with other people and (2)facts about the quality of my own action.

A New Atheistical Argument

2009-11-19T16:57:00.002-05:00

(1) Our bodies are adapted for the performance of acts that are morally wrong. [Premise]

(2) If God existed and we are the result of special creation, then our bodies would not be adapted for the performance of acts that are morally wrong. [Premise]

(3) Therefore, either God does not exist or we are not the result of special creation. [from Lines 1 and 2]

Consider Line 1: what this means is not just that our aptitude for the performance of acts that are morally wrong is the side-effect of our being adapted for the performance of morally neutral types of action. Are we adapted for making atomic weapons? Well... not really. Rather we are endowed with general aptitudes for science and tool-making. By contrast, it is plausible that we are adapted for non-monogamy -- primarily, serial monogamy and cheating. Some evidence for this is that rates of non-monogamy are much higher among those who have the highest reproductive potential.

Consider Line 2: Special creation requires that our biological nature be fixed by design. Thus, if a particular aptitude is an adaptation, then its existence is the result of God's design. Things are going according to plan, insofar as we possess that adaptation.

Chisholm v. Classical Compatibilism: Part III

2009-10-14T12:42:00.002-04:00

Sadly, the classical compatibilist derivation of PAPC from PAP will not apply in any straightforward way to the claim that you couldn't have decided to do anything other than what you did decide to do.

Here's a straightforward derivation:

You have the ability to decide otherwise.

Therefore, had you decided to decide otherwise you would have decided otherwise.

The problem is that it is not at all clear that the classical compatibilist's counterfactual analysis of ability (and hence practical modality) makes much sense here. If having the ability to decide otherwise requires that (in nearby metaphysically possible worlds) I decide to decide otherwise and so decide otherwise, I am doubtful I have this ability.

Chisholm v. Classical Compatibilism: Part II

2009-10-12T12:46:00.004-04:00

As part of his argument that PAP is not equivalent to PAPC, Chisholm makes the following inference:

(1) You couldn't have decided to do anything other than what you did decide to do.

(2) Therefore, you could not have done anything other than what you did do.

This seems correct, but I've been wondering what one might do to resist Chisholm's inference.

What if "could" means different things in each line? The word "could" is a shifty beast and it can be hard to police. For example, if the first line asserts that it was morally impossible (i.e. forbidden) to decide otherwise, but the second line asserts that it was logically impossible to do otherwise, then the inference would equivocate in a way that would defeat the transfer of warrant from line 1 to line 2.

The classical compatibilist's view that we ought to understand PAP as PAPC rests on the thought that "could" here is a practical modality. I can do something if and only if I have the ability to do it. The classical compatibilist then gives a counterfactual account of having an ability. Thus, the classical compatibilist's understanding of PAP (as PAPC) can be derived like so:

(3) You're accountable for x only if you had the ability to not x.

(4) You have the ability to not x only if had you decided to not x, you would have not x-ed.

(5) Therefore, you're accountable for x only if had you decided to not x, you have not x-ed.

An effective argument against the classical compatibilist, then, will be one in which the modality in play is understood as practical possibility.

Chisholm v. Classical Compatibilism: Part I

2009-10-09T15:53:00.006-04:00

The classical compatibilist argues that properly understood, the thought that we're accountable for having done something only if we could have done otherwise does not yield the conclusion that if determinism is true, we're accountable for nothing.

According to the classical compatibilist, what we indicate by utterances of "x couldn't have done otherwise" is that x lacked the ability to do otherwise. This, in turn, gets understood as its being false that if x had decided to do otherwise, then would have done otherwise.

Thus, on the classical compatibilist view,

x is accountable for y only if x could have done otherwise [call this PAP]

should be understood as

x is accountable for y only if it is true that had x decided otherwise, x would have done otherwise. [call this PAPC]

As it happens, on this construal, the idea that accountability requires the ability to do otherwise is no barrier to accepting that we're both determined and accountable.

Sadly, as Chisholm argues, it is far from clear that PAP is equivalent to PAPC. The problem is this: it could be true that you would have done otherwise, had you decided to, but false that you could have done otherwise.

His argument goes like this:

(1) Suppose that you couldn't have decided to do anything other than what you did decide to do.

(2) Therefore, you could not have done anything other than what you did do.

(3) But, it might nonetheless be true that you would have done something else had you decided to do something else.

(4) Therefore, PAP is not equivalent to PAPC.

The Possibility of Metaphysics

2009-09-14T16:31:00.003-04:00

It seems to me that there are two paths to metaphysics. Each of them begins with the possibility of a kind of gap between knowing that some set of beliefs is true and having a kind of understanding of the way things are.

Sense and Truth-Making

One can know something without knowing what makes it true. Of course, God might appear to me and inform me that blablabah is true. Sadly, I do not understand his language and so -- even though I have some grip on the truth -- my epistemic position is less than perfect. But even if I am in a position to grasp the thought expressed by a sentence, I might desire to know more... and metaphysical reflection might well be supposed to help me.

Consider the predicament of Louise Lane. Her problem is not like my problem with God's unintelligible testimony. When someone tells her that Superman is in the City, she can grasp that thought. She often, indeed, wishes he was around more often. Moreover, if someone tells her that Clark Kent is in the City, she can grasp that thought, as well.

So, she might know that Superman is in the City and that Clark Kent is in the City. But, her picture of the world is incomplete. There is more she might reasonably aspire to know. She might know a great deal and yet -- because of the phenomena that motivates Frege's Puzzle -- not know what makes her thoughts true. She doesn't know that Kal-El and his location is what makes her thoughts true.

One wonders how complete a true picture of reality might be and still allow for ignorance about that which makes this picture true. Assuming leeway on this, perhaps one job of the metaphysician is to provide a picture of the underlying reality in virtue of which our thoughts are true.

The Great Chain of Constitution

Fred: Are there numbers?

Mike: Yes; there is, for example, one natural number between 3 and 1.

Fred: Great... so I guess we should become Platonists...

Mike: Well no... numerical facts obtain because [insert some story about sets or something]

Fred: So I guess you're saying that there is a kind of explanation, by which we show how some domain of (less basic) facts is grounded in some other domain of (more basic) facts.

Mike: Yes! I call it the 'Great Chain of Constitution'.

Fred: Awesome!

Mike: Totes.

Fred: I think I have some minimal understanding of causal explanations... I wonder, though, what this non-causal, constitutive explanation might come down to.

Fred: Me too... but if there is a hierarchy of constitution relations, which get picked out by true constitutive explanations, then I maybe I get to be a metaphysician.

Veridical Hallucination and a New Evil Demon

2009-08-12T14:54:00.004-04:00

Consider the course of sensory experience to which I have been subject throughout my life. Being a natural empiricist, I have come to believe much of what I believe on the basis of this experience. Presumably, this experience has given me warrant for many of the beliefs I have formed on its basis, such that these beliefs rise to the happy status of knowledge. However, there are possible situations in which I am subject to a phenomenally identical course of experience which fails to produce knowledge. (pace the disjunctivist)

Descartes' evil demon scenario, one presumes, describes such a possibility. In his scenario, my knowledge is defeated because the beliefs I form on the basis of experience are false. It is something of an open question whether the existence of such knowledge-defeating possibilities entails that my beliefs in actuality fail to rise to the status of knowledge. Call this the Vexed Question. In asking the Vexed Question about the Cartesian scenario we ask "does the existence of a possibility in which my beliefs are defeated by being made false defeat my actual beliefs?"

However, truth is but one requirement on knowledge. And one might wonder whether there are possibilities in which my beliefs are defeated, but not in virtue of being false.

Consider, then, veridical hallucination. To be subject to veridical hallucination is to be subject to visual experience that is accurate (i.e. veridical), but part of an episode of hallucination. Imagine, for a (sort of) example, dreaming, that the house is flooding, when (in reality) it is.

If veridical hallucination is possible, and if the fact that one is hallucinating rather than perceiving defeats knowledge, then there exists a skeptical scenario. In this scenario, my course of experience is as veridical as it is in the actual world, but is nonetheless wholly hallucinatory. In this scenario, I form the same beliefs on the basis of experience as I do in the actual case. And, interestingly, almost all of these beliefs are true. However, because the course of experience is hallucinatory, rather than perceptual, despite their truth, these beliefs cannot constitute knowledge on my part.

In asking the Vexed Question of my evil demon we ask "does the existence of a possibility in which my beliefs are defeated by being gruonded in hallucinatory (though veridical) experience defeat my actual beliefs?" Does answering the Vexed Question work differently in these two kinds of cases -- the truth defeating demon and the perception defeator demon?

Has anyone written about this, I wonder.

"I am a published author!" is fictionally true.

2008-04-25T16:55:00.004-04:00

Belief v. Desire: The Normative Authority of our Attitudes (OUP, 2009)

This short book contains a a groundbreaking exploration of the differences in subjective normative authority between belief and desire. It is an interesting fact that, while we might be alienated from our desires, we cannot be alienated from our beliefs. A believer must see her beliefs as entitled and entitling, while the desirous agent might fail to see her desires as moving her toward the good. Moreover, my beliefs speak for me, while my desires need not. It is persuasively argued that understanding this distinction has wide-ranging implications for moral psychology, epistemology, ethics of belief, action theory, and meta-ethics. "Holy crap is this a good little monograph!" -- David Velleman

Self as Society: Willing, Thinking, and Reasoning as Social Phenomena (MIT, 2009)

Drawing together diverse philosophical and psychological literatures, it is demonstrated that selfhood (both synchronic and diachronic) is metaphysically constituted by fundamentally social processes. Moreover, seeing how social processes constitute the self enables us to understand many of the puzzles that have blocked progress in the theory of content.

Pop Culture Update: The Bird and The Bee

2007-10-03T12:33:00.000-04:00

I've been listening to the Bird and the Bee's new EP, "Please Clap Your Hands". Holy crap! I love these guys. "Who are the Bird and the Bee?", you ask. The band is composed of Inara George and Greg Kurstin. Greg Kurstin is the keyboardist whose sound is a huge influence on Beck's album, "Mutations" (which is just about my favorite Beck album). Mainly, my love of the Bird and the Bee is explained by my enduring love for Inara George, the chief vocalist for the Bird and the Bee.

Generally, she has a natural-sounding voice. She shies away from the kinds of histrionics that characterize American Idol singing. If you have heard Astrud Gilberto's work, then you'll have some idea of what Inara George's voice is like. Her simple vocal style is, however, the vehicle for sophisticated, but accessible, harmonic ideas. Everyone should check out her solo album, "All Rise", which, in addition to featuring her singing, indicates her skillz with guitar-based song-writing. At any rate, go to her website and check out "Fool's Work" and "Genius".

The Bird and the Bee has a bit more pop and electronica in it than her solo work. Additionally, it has more of a retro mid-60s feel to it. In the mid-to-late 90s, there was a bit of a mid-60s retro kitsch revival. This was witnessed by a brief enthusiasm for Esquivel, the madman behind the last baroque flowering of big band music. But, as these things go, what begins with a kind of ironic appreciation, often ends up being a serious appreciation. The 90s enthusiasm for mid-60s kitsch didn't go much of anywhere until now. The Bird and the Bee seem to me to have digested this late 90s ironic retro-ism and extracted a serious aesthetic from it. Especially check out their songs "Polite Dance Song" and "Again and Again".

Analytic Philosophers on the Fear of Death

2007-09-30T14:14:00.000-04:00

I've been teaching some of the dialectic stemming from Nagel's article on the rationality of the fear of death again. This time through, a worry that had been inchoate became clearer to me. There are two kinds of interesting argument that our attitudes about death are irrational. The first set of arguments all conclude that being dead cannot be bad for you and so, if you fear it, you are being irrational. You are being irrational in the same way you would be if you believed something to be purple when it is not. The second kind of argument is a challenge to the consistency of our attitudes. It concludes that the horror with which we conceive our own demise is inconsistent with the mildness with which we conceive our prenatal non-existence.

The worry is this: the analytic response to these arguments consists in pointing out how these arguments turn on premises that are grossly inconsistent with our common sense attitudes. But, in a context in which the rationality of our fear of death is in dispute, it is not at all clear to me that one ought to treat the deliverances of common sense as authoritative. Taking the question -- should I be afraid of death -- seriously already requires rejecting the authority of common sense. After all, the thesis that death is not bad for you is itself grossly inconsistent with common sense.

To get a flavor of how this dialectic works consider the following line of thought: Nagel notes that if an argument for the conclusion that we ought not fear death rests on the supposition that the badness of a condition must be intrinsic to the time during which it exists, then we might reject it on the grounds that the badness of things like failure is not wholly constituted by the time during which one has failed. He points out, plausibly enough, that the special badness of failure is a relational matter. The special badness of failure consists in a relation between the condition you're in during which you have failed and the condition you could have been in had you not failed. Great. So common sense is committed to rejecting any argument premised on the claim that badness must be non-relational.

So should we be afraid of death or not? At best we have learned from Nagel that it is not a requirement of common sense that we not fear death. This is because common sense would recommend rejecting a premise that would oblige us to think that the fear of death is irrational. But this is not a surprise. After all, we already know that common sense would require that we fear death. If we are required by common sense to fear death, then it is no surprise that common sense does not also command that we be unafraid of death.

How is the philosopher to settle his mind on a question, which, if it is taken seriously, must undermine the authority of the evidence on which he would rely to settle his mind?

Stone Hill Norton: Weedy Goat (and not in a good way)

2007-09-28T14:34:00.000-04:00

So I opened the Stone Hill Norton last night and sipped it while I watched the movie Black Book (which I loved, but that would be another post). Despite being about twice the cost of the Illinois Cellars' Norton, it was a worse wine. It wasn't particularly sweet or goaty, but it was thin and astringent. Perhaps it will have opened up since last night - thereby becoming a little less astringent - but this will probably not improve its body.

Part of the problem, presumably, was its aging in oak barrels. A little oak can improve a wine, but all too often vintners appear to use oak to cover up imperfection and so drinking a wine can turn out to be like sucking on a wood chip. This wasn't that bad, but it certainly was more like sucking on a wood chip than one would prefer. At any rate, the thin-ness was the real problem.

It had a little of that wet mammalian hint, which I would normally have welcomed. However, the wine was also unpleasantly weedy. Sometimes a wine is described as herbaceous or tasting subtly of grass... and this is supposed to be a good thing. In the case of the Stone Hill Norton, it tasted a little like bad hay... thus: "weedy". Interestingly, the weediness and the wet mammal melded in a way that removed any potential for pleasure from the taste of wet mammal. (I realize that the previous sentence contains what might seem like a paradoxical presupposition; but, trust me, a little wet mammal can be nice.)

Summing up: Thus far, the Illinois Cellars' Norton is still by far the best I've tried and at less cost than its rivals. I ended my last post - the one on the Catawba - with a list of whites I'd like to try. Perhaps I should branch out and try some different North American reds - in particular, the Baco Noir or Chambourcin.

The Pink Catawba

2007-09-20T12:26:00.000-04:00

So I tried the Pink Catawba last night. The first impression was one of overwhelming sweetness. Luckily it was well-chilled, so that helped a little. Additionally, it had a very grape-y flavor, perhaps a little tropical fruit to it. The grapiness was not quite the same as the Welch's grape jelly flavor of the concord grape, it was more like the grapiness of the scuppernong muscadine grape. After the initial Koolade shock, a kind of pleasantly mysterious grassiness was manifest. Mostly, this was an aftertaste, though, once detected, it was manifest in subsequent sips. Also, it had a ton of body. This was surely due to the tooth-achingly huge amount of sugar in it.

Overall: I liked the muscadine grapiness, though it would be better toned down. I liked the grassy/herbaceous notes quite a bit. This would be a much better wine with more acid and much less sweetness. Is the sweetness of a wine mostly a function of its production, or does it depend more on the grape itself? That is, would it be possible to make a drier Catawba? I'd be interested in trying that.

Hmm... maybe I should try some other varietal: Chardonel, Vidal Blanc, Verdelet, or Vignoles. All of these are hybrids reputed to be drier than Catawba, but possessing interesting fruitiness

PS: If you haven't tried a scuppernong grape, you must get some. They are mostly grown in Georgia, but are shipped around the country (at least to fancy markets in the Midwest) around this time of year. They are fantastic and quite different from the run-of-the-mill grocery store grape.

Do I Detect Notes of Wet Goat?

2007-09-19T14:00:00.000-04:00

So for some reason which remains mysterious to me I have decided to engage in a gastronomical project. In particular, I plan on sampling a variety of wines made with North American grapes. Typically, and with good reason, the wines we drink are made from European grapes -- Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Shiraz, Zinfandel, Chardonnay, etc. However, the world is full of wacky varieties of grape. Check out www.winelabels.org for a "taste" of the variety of wine grapes out there. At any rate, North America is home to its own varietals. Many of these are hybrids between native grapes and old world grapes.

I am old enough to remember thinking that the North American wine industry was a new thing. ...that sometime in the late 60s Californians discovered that it was possible to make tasty -- as opposed to cheap and intoxicating -- wines from grapes grown in the US. However, ignorant that I was, I did not know that, prior to the prohibition of alcohol (a disaster, by all accounts), the Midwest (in addition to parts of western New York) was the center of a huge and well-respected wine-producing industry.

Among the most popular of the 19th century North American wine-producing grapes were the Norton and the Catawba. The first was used to make red wines and the second a rose'. You may be amazed to learn that Ohio was the throbbing heartland of vineyards making wines with Catawba.

As it happens, the viticulture is reviving in the Midwest and these revived wineries are producing wines made with North American grapes. ...Pretty exciting.

So I have only tasted three wines made with North American grapes at this point.

(1) Bully Hill (NY): Love My Goat: The characteristic pitfalls of red wines made with North American grapes are that they lack body, are too sweet, and taste of wet dog (I am not kidding). This was my first such wine and it certainly confirmed my worst fears. It was described, if I recall, as "semi-dry", which really means that it was incredibly sweet. It had very little body. It was the most transparent red wine I have ever had the misfortune to see through. It is not clear what varietals went into this one. Did I detect notes of wet dog? Maybe it was more like wet goat. ugh.

(2) Mount Pleasant (MO): Norton: My interest in North American Grapes continues to plunge. This one was reasonably dry and full-bodied. It even had that spiciness I like in a red wine. But it had a grape jelly fruitiness to it that I found off-putting. Moreover, the wet dog flavor was pretty pronounced.

Strangely (courageously?) I persisted. (Could it be that I am seeking authentic American roots? Or is it, rather, that I am seeking the Other, which is paradoxically to be found in archaic America? I have no idea what imperative drives me here.)

(3) Illinois Cellars (IL): Norton (2005): Yum. This one was good. In fact, it was so much like a European wine that I felt a little cheated. I had begun to hope for at least a hint of moist animal. Luckily, after it opened up a little, there was a little -- just a hint -- of foxiness. Just what I was looking for. On my second glass, I began to notice a little grape jelly fruitiness, but just enough to make it interesting. At $6, this is a bargain. I tried the 2002, and it is similarly tasty.

Next on my list. I have a Mt. Pleasant (MO) Catawba chilling in the fridge. What will it be like? Also, I have a Stone Hill (MO) Norton awaiting sampling.

why it would be cool to be a photographer, #3

2007-09-17T12:45:00.000-04:00

Rythm, by 35 MM Studio

Belief and Religion

2007-08-15T08:28:00.000-04:00

As a response to the new atheists, Scruton revives the view that since religious practice and thinking is not fundamentally a matter of doctrine, it is a mistake to respond to it as if it were flawed science.

Hitchens is an intelligent and widely read man who recognises that the arguments most useful to him were well known 200 years ago. His book takes us through territory charted by Hume, Voltaire, Diderot and Kant, and nobody familiar with the Enlightenment can believe that our contemporary imitators have added anything to its stance against religion, whatever examples they can add to the list of religiously motivated crimes. However, Enlightenment thinkers, having shown the claims of faith to be without rational foundation, did not then dismiss religion, as one might dismiss a refuted theory. Many went on to conclude that religion must have some other origin than the pursuit of scientific knowledge, and some other psychic function than consolation. The ease with which the common doctrines of religion could be refuted alerted men like Jacobi, Schiller and Schelling to the idea that religion is not, in essence, a matter of doctrine, but of something else. And they set out to discover what that might be.

The article continues with a fascinating discussion of some anthropological treatments of religious phenomena. It brings back dim (but fond) memories of the theory of religion class I took as a freshman in college. Check it out.

why it would be cool to be a photographer, #2

2007-08-13T16:48:00.001-04:00

Revival with Roses II, by Mehmeturgut

why it would be cool to be a photographer

2007-08-13T16:38:00.000-04:00

Hand, by Noahlee

Olde Times

2007-03-25T13:33:00.000-04:00

Dearest readership:

No doubt you've been waiting with baited breath for a new post. Sadly, I have been busy job-marketing and avoiding work on the old dissertation. This has been the cause of a whole new form of shame and self-loathing. Yum!

But spring has sprung and things are looking up! Since I am going to write my dissertation in the next three months, I decided to begin by finishing some music on which I've been working.

(I know: this is how work does not get done... but give me a break, bitches.)

Here is a draft of my new composition:

Olde Times

It switches charmingly between a fun 80s dance piece (think Axel F) and totally butt-kicking half-time groove. Finally -- after a short glossy club turn -- it unifies the previously differing emotional tones of the two main sections, with a bit of church-y feedback. Start with frivolity, move to anxiety, wrap up by turning the frivolity and anxiety into joyous awe... that's the idea. I think it is the bee's knees.

Your Brave Leader,
-Idris

A Question

2006-08-21T23:12:00.000-04:00

Could all the facts about what is possible or necessary supervene on the actual facts?

Externalism, Visual Content, and Burge: Part 2

2006-07-26T18:22:00.000-04:00

I claimed that whether Burge's strategy will succeed in the case of visual contents depends, remember, on whether experiences that P and the thoughts that might aspire to be knowledge of the contents of those experiences share contents as a matter of course.

I will argue that the Burge-style account cannot be extended to our knowledge of the content of our own experiences because (i) the representational resources utilized by experience and belief are different, (ii) the beliefs that accompany experience are not part of the experiences they accompany, and (iii) the beliefs that accompany experience are not about the experiences they accompany.

There is abundant reason to suspect that belief-forming mechanisms use representational resources that differ from those used by the visual system. Accordingly, if there is to be a justificatory account of our beliefs about our own experiences, it must be one that differs from Burge's.

A Red Herring: It is commonly claimed that experiences have non-conceptual contents. It is sometimes thought that this identifies a particular kind of content -- a kind of content that differs intrinsically from the contents of conceptual states. Perhaps one has in mind the view that propositional attitudes have contents that are composed of concepts -- whatever those are -- while experiences do not. If so, it follows that beliefs and experiences cannot have the same contents, since they take different sorts of things as objects. If so, it follows that Burge's maneuver cannot work. Since the experience that P cannot share contents with beliefs about it, these beliefs won't count as knowledge of the content of the experience since they do not share contents with the experience. Call this line of argument Red Herring. It turns out, however, that Red Herring is mistaken. Or, more carefully, the conception of the contents of experience Red Herring relies on is not justified by the standard arguments in favor of the existence of non-conceptual content.

The claim that experiences have non-conceptual contents should probably be understood as requiring only that a your experience can represent a feature even if you lack the conceptual resources to judge that things possesses that feature. It is possible for your experience to represent what you cannot. There is, in principle, no obstacle to someone's possession of the conceptual wherewithal to match his visual system's representational capacities. However, the fineness of grain and inexpressibility arguments used to establish the existence of non-conceptual content turn on there being actual differences between our conceptual resources and the representational capacity of our visual systems.

While Red Herring is no friend to someone who would seek to criticize the Burge strategies application to the case of visual content, we can now see how, if properly understood, the thesis that visual contents are non-conceptual poses a threat the Burge strategy.

In the best case for Burge's strategy, experiences and thoughts about them will share contents. But, even if experiences and thoughts about them share contents, their sharing those contents is not explained by the use of the same representational capacities. Thoughts deploy conceptual representational resources, while experiences do not. Since the representational capacities in virtue of which we believe and experience things differ, the relevant beliefs cannot be constituted as knowledge by the sharing of representational capacities. If they are constituted as knowledge, the explanation for their status must differ from the one Burge gives for judgments and our beliefs about our own judgments.

At any rate, remember, we are not the sort of creatures who can attribute in thought all of the properties our experience attributes to objects.

Let's set aside the challenge posed to a Burge-style account by non-conceptual contents for a moment. What if the contents of a subject's experience were such that they were thinkable by that subject? That is, what if there were a subject who could think what he experiences? What if, moreover, the relevant experiences and beliefs utilized the same representational resources. Even so there are functional differences between judgments and experiences that get in the way of a Burge-style account of our knowledge of the content of our own experience.

There are two problems for the Burge-style account here. First, the beliefs that accompany experience are not the right kind of beliefs to count as knowledge of the contents of the experiences they accompany. Second, the relation between the relevant experiences and beliefs is of the wrong sort.

I'll address this second point first. On Burge's account, we have certain kinds of knowledge of (at least some of) our own judgments because judgment-representing beliefs are part of these judgments. It is not simply that the judgments-representing beliefs share contents with and utilize the same representational resources as the judgments they represent. In addition to all that, the judgment-representing beliefs are part of the judgments they represent. And this fact explains their status as knowledge.

On Burge's account the relevant judgment that P always occasions the belief that I have judged that P. The reason for this is that the cases that Burge is giving an account of are cases of what he calls second-order reflexive judgments -- judgments that could be perspicuously expressed by sentences like "I am hereby thinking that water is wet." In such cases, the content of the judgment that P is "taken right up" by the second-order reflexive judgment.

(Such cases are probably the norm for judgment. The second-order belief needn't be tokened in a reflexive conscious judgment. You needn't assert inwardly "I hereby think that water is wet" in order for it to be true that the judgment that water is wet be accompanied by the belief that you have judged that P. Indeed, that a judgment counts as a judgment probably requires that it be accompanied by the belief. Judgments reflect a settling of the mind. In judgment, a temporary uncertainty is, at least for the time, resolved. Unless one believed that one had judged the matter, why would one feel settled?)

It is plausible that judgments occasion second-order beliefs and it is plausible that they do so in such a way that the second-order belief counts as knowledge. However, things are different with experience. The beliefs I form while I am experiencing are not part of the experience.

Consider now my worry that the beliefs that, in humans, accompany experience are of the wrong sort to constitute knowledge of the contents of those experiences. The beliefs that normally accompany judgment are judgment-representing beliefs. However, the beliefs that normally accompany experience are not experience-representing beliefs. Instead the beliefs that normally accompany experience are environment-representing beliefs. These beliefs are the ones of the sort we have when we "believe what we see". Thus the beliefs are formed as normal accompaniments to experience do not have the right subject-matter to count as knowledge of the contents of our own experiences.

The Burge-style account cannot be extended to our knowledge of the content of our own experiences because (i) the representational resources utilized by experience and belief are different, (ii) the beliefs that accompany experience are not part of the experiences they accompany, and (iii) the beliefs that accompany experience are not about the experiences they accompany.

Externalism, Visual Content, and Burge

2006-07-26T15:29:00.000-04:00

In this post, I will argue that Burge's strategy for explaining our knowledge of our own thoughts cannot be extended to our knowledge of our own visual experiences.

Externalism about the contents of our propositional attitudes is often thought to be inconsistent with the claim that we know by introspection -- i.e. without the benefit of knowledge of the environment around us and our embedding in it -- what we're thinking.

The arguments generally go something like this: Suppose it is true that I don't (indeed cannot) know that I am not a brain in a vat. The justification for this claim rests on the idea that I could not distinguish between being a brain in a vat and not being a brain in a vat. Now suppose that whether I am thinking that P depends on me not being a brain in a vat. Now suppose that I am now judging that P. Since I cannot know that I am not a brain in a vat, I cannot know that I am judging that P, rather than something other than P.

Burge provides both an answer to this kind of argument and an independent account of why introspection might provide knowledge. I won't address his diagnosis of the skeptical argument, I would, however, like to comment on his account of self-knowledge.

Burge argues as follows: Suppose that your cognitive faculties are in working order. Suppose you judge that P. It is plausible that as you judge that P you believe that you judge that P. Does this belief -- that you are judging that P -- rise to the happy status of knowledge? Burge argues that it does. The reason, as far as I can tell is this: the judgment that P and the belief that you are judging that P are grounded in the same representational resources. Thus, whatever mechanisms determine the content of your judgement that P also fix the content of your belief that you are judging that P. So, since the content of your judgment that P and the content of your belief that you have judged that P must be the same, there is a non-accidental connection between the truth of your belief that you have judged that P and your believing that you have judged that P. There is, that is, a non-accidental connection between your judgment and your belief of the knowledge constituting sort.

I propose to accept what Burge says here. When you judge that P, you know that you are judging that P. You know this because the belief and the judgment rely on the same representational resources. My worry is this: this strategy will not succeed in justifying the knowledge we have of the content of our own perceptual experiences.

When I look around I am subject to visual experience. This visual experience has a content in virtue of which particular things sensuously seem this way or that (blue-right-there or curved-like-that, for example). The content of my experience, presumably, contributes to the phenomenal character of my experience. Perhaps I cannot put it into words, but it seems that I am intimately acquainted with how things seem to me.

But there is abundant reason to suspect that the contents of visual experiences -- like the contents of the propositional attitudes -- depend on how one is embedded in an environment. Suppose, then, that how things seem to you depends on what kind of environment you're embedded in. Thus, for example, whether the content of your experience is P or Q depends on whether you're a brain in a vat or not.

Now we get an argument that parallels the argument that, given externalism, we don't know the contents of our own thoughts. Since you cannot distinguish between being a brain in a vat from not being a brain in a vat, you do not know that your experience has content P, rather than content Q. Thus, since how things seem to you depends on what the contents of your experience are, you do not know how things seem to you. Aggh!

Probably there are places to object to this argument, but suppose we wished to explain how we have self-knowledge regarding the contents of our own experiences. Could we use Burge's strategy? We'll want to look at two things: (i) experiences that P and (ii) the thoughts that might aspire to be knowledge of the contents of those experiences. Whether Burge's strategy can be extended to this case depends on whether these experiences and thoughts utilize the same representational resources.

There is abundant reason to suspect that belief-forming mechanisms use representational resources that differ from those used by the visual system. Accordingly, if there is to be a justificatory account of our beliefs about our own experiences, it must be one that differs from Burge's.

In a follow-up post, I'll say something about why we should think that the representational resources grounding our belief-forming capacity differ from those grounding our visual experiences. Stay tuned!

Epistemic Internalism and The Agential Regulation of Belief

2006-05-08T18:23:00.000-04:00

It has been argued that Epistemic Internalism -- which I'll here take as the claim that "the justificatory status of a person's doxastic attitudes strongly supervenes on the person's mental states, events, and conditions." -- is supported by the idea that one of the jobs of an account of justification is to provide guidance to those who would improve their doxastic practice. This reasoning rests on a mistaken understanding of what guidance requires.

Steve Petersen argues on these grounds in favor of a kind of internalist epistemology. Likewise, Pollock and Cruz, make reference to this kind of reasoning in their defense of internalism about justification:

"If improvement is to be possible, however, it needs to be possible to determine which belief among many candidate beliefs is most justified. Internalists have been driven, then, by what we might think of as rational solipsism since, in their view, we are alone in the task of refining our beliefs and the only resources we have to work with are the ones that can be brought to bear internally. Second, epistemic concepts have been viewed as deontological in character. That is, it has seemed to many epistemologists that intellectual achievement is at least partly a matter of duty-fulfillment. Fulfilling a duty, however, seems to require that one be able to do the things that duty requires and to determine what oneÃ’s duties are. In order to secure the means to an intellectual duty, an epistemic agent will need to be able to reflect on her condition and on the resources she has available."

Thus they conclude that it is reasonable to suppose that whatever determines the justificatory status of a belief supervenes on an epistemic agent's own mind. The idea is this: only an epistemic agent's own mind is accessible in such a way as to allow for the refinement of belief and the fulfillment of epistemic duty.

As Petersen puts it:

"...any proposed epistemic standard that demands some contingent relation obtain between the thinker's psychological state and something external to it will fail the guidance intuition. For since the standard is contingently relational, all the intrinsic properties of the psychological state could stay the same while its success in obtaining the relation to the things external could change. Therefore, again, error with respect to this standard cannot be cognitively accessible to the thinker."

Petersen, Pollock, and Cruz are all mistaken. The guidance intuition -- as Petersen puts it -- does place some constraints on the kinds of factors that make for certain kinds of epistemic value. Likewise, the fact that we might have epistemic duties probably constrains the the kinds of factors that make for certain kinds of epistemic value. However, the result is not that these kinds of epistemic value must inhere in the internal -- introspectively accessible -- state of the epistemic agent.

What is plausibly required is that these factors be cognitively accessible, full stop. If that which makes for epistemically valuable belief is beyond my ken, then I can hardly be blamed for failing to regulate my belief in its light. This is because I cannot seek to regulate my belief in light of what is beyond my ken.

Petersen's worry (and I think Pollock and Cruz's) is that facts external to me cannot be accessible, since they might vary while I stay the same. (This is an entailment of their being external to me.) Accordingly, PP&C conclude, those dimensions of epistemic value in light of which I might be expected or wish to regulate by belief must be internal to me.

However, I doubt that the mere contingency of my grasp on the external facts is enough to put those facts beyond my ken. Consider the position of a security guard supervising a government lab via closed circuit TV. Does he have access to the facts about how things are going in the government lab? Given that the cameras etc. are in working order, the guard has access to activities in the lab. Of course, the image on his TV screen is such that it could exist, even while superspies have damaged the cameras in the lab, but this doesn't by itself defeat the claim that he has access to the facts. A mode of access might be reliable without being necessarily reliable.

My possession of access to some domain of facts requires that those facts have some impact on me. Thus it is clear that if I am to regulate my beliefs in light of their justificatory status it had better be possible for the justificatory status of my beliefs to have some impact on me. However, so long as the factors that constitute that status are accessible to me, they needn't be internal to me -- needn't be constituted by my mental states, relations between my mental states, etc. They needn't be internal to me because access doesn't require necessitation.

May 22nd: Welcome carnies! Many thanks to anniemiz for organizing the gala.

God and The Authority of Morality

2006-03-25T11:33:00.000-05:00

In his article, "A Short Introduction to Kantian Ethics", David Velleman reports a Kantian argument for the conclusion that the authority of our moral obligations cannot derive from their being instituted by God. I am dubious.

Velleman writes:

According to Kant, the force of moral requirements does not even depend on the authority of God. There is a simple argument for denying this dependence. If we were subject to moral requirements because they were imposed on us by God, the reason would have to be that we are subject to a requirement to do what God requires of us; and the force of this latter requirement, of obedience to God, could not itself depend on God's authority. (To require obedience to God on the grounds that God requires it would be viciously circular.) The requirement to obey God's requirements would therefore have to constitute a fundamental duty, on which all other duties depended; and so God's authority would not account for the force of our duties, after all.

Idris Responds:

According to Kant, if it were true that the authority of morality derived from God's creative act, then there would have to be a requirement that we do what God commands, and only because of this requirement would the particular commandments of God – refrain from lying, take care of your children – apply to us. Kant then causes trouble by asking where the authority of this requirement comes from. Kant is portrayed as supposing that a general requirement to do as God commands is prior to the particular requirements of morality. It is prior in the sense that the authority of the particular requirements of morality derives from it.

However, I don’t see why anyone would be committed to the idea that it is only because of a general requirement to do as God commands that God’s creation of particular moral requirements succeeds. God’s particular commands could have basic authority. Question: Why avoid stealing? Answer: Because God has ruled out stealing (and this is the end of the story). Thus Kant’s supposition that God’s particular commands have authority over us only if there is a general requirement to do as God commands seems to be gratuitous. If so, we needn’t conclude that there is one requirement that has authority over us independent of God’s making it authoritative. Kant needs to give us an argument that God’s creation of morality must involve a general requirement to do as God requires.

I suspect that part of the dispute will come down to questions about what sorts of requirements might turn out to be basic requirements (requirements deriving their authority from no other requirements).

Winter Stream by Ivan Bilibin

2006-03-24T00:10:00.000-05:00

Seeing things like this makes me wonder: why have I wasted my life on things that are not beautiful?

Better Music

2006-03-12T14:01:00.000-05:00

So the music I've been posting has been too complicated... everything plus the kitchen sink. And I've been working on stripping things down and aiming at simpler, more intelligable, better structures. 80s revivalism is the method:

Check out: "Sun in My Eyes"

Check out: "802"

"802" is still very much in progress.

New Music!

2005-09-22T16:42:00.000-04:00

All:

Things are going well, though busy.

Anyway, here are two tunes that will make you feel good:

www.umich.edu/~hughesa/beat.aif This one is about two months old. It has a certain... something. You might wish to wash your ears out with soap, when it is done. You can call it whatever you want.

www.umich.edu/~hughesa/mrdj4.aif This one is the best thing that ever came out of Garageband. I mean that. I need to figure out a name for it.

News later.

Fondly,
-Idris

Foreknowledge, Memory, Personal Identity

2005-08-01T14:22:00.000-04:00

According to a memory-based accounts of personal identity, that in virtue of which I count as the same person as the person named Alex who lived in my apartment a year and a half ago is my memory of his activities. The bond between me and Past-Alex is founded on memory.

[DIGRESSION: This is a strange view, since, of course, I remember other people in addition to Past-Alex and it is not clear why remembering Past-Alex's activities should be thought to ground identity, unless one is sneaking in some identity-presupposing conception of memory. That is a worry anyway. END DIGRESSION]

What I would like to talk about is a different kind of problem: that posed by our knowledge of the future. At its most general, a memory-based theory of ID, claims that identity is explained by reference to knowledge: the reason Past-Alex was me is because I have access -- via memory -- to the facts about, for example, what it was like to be him. To the extent my knowledge is defeated -- by defective memory -- my claim to be identical to Past-Alex is undermined. If I have forgotten a great deal about Past-Alex, then I no longer count as him... or something.

But note that, on certain views, one's access to Future-Self is much more fraught than one's access to Past-Self. It is a mainstream position in the Divine Foreknowledge/Freedom Debate to claim that there are no truths about the future. That there is nothing to know about the future (excepting necessary truths?). If God is cut off from the knowledge of the future, I can hardly do better. So, while I presumably know many things about Past-Alex -- and in virtue of that knowledge count as him -- I cannot know about Future-Alex. If knowledge grounds identity, then no Future-Alex will be me.

But this seems crazy. No doubt, the guy who may well finish typing this sentence will be the same guy who started typing it. But consistency with an abstracted version of memory theory ought to rule that out. No one person ever completes a sentence!

Some options:

1) Show that the abstraction from memory to knowledge is illegitimate. Memory is as deep as identity goes.

2) Explain how there is some principled reason why epistemic access from now-to-future is different from epistemic access from now-to-past. That is, explain why identity should be grounded in a temporally asymmetrical manner. I mean: weirdly, I may become Future-Alex, but only because he will remember me and not because I now know about him. Isn't that a little strange. It is as if: though I am not now identical to that future person, I will become identical to him once he gets around to remembering me. Sigh.

3) Believe that sentences are sometimes finished by people, and ditch the claim that ID is based on memory.

Think about: the funny differences in our attitudes about future and past suffering -- also: prenatal non-existence vs posthumous non-existence.

Think about: temporal asymmetry generally.

Think about: the weirdness of tense... maybe there is a kind of error in reasoning here, which is brought on by the funniness of time and tense.

Sentential Attitudes/Inner Assertion

2005-07-22T15:07:00.000-04:00

So earlier I suggested that we should think of judgment as silent assertion. The reason is primarily phenomenological: when I deliberate about what to do I talk silently to myself. I start out asking myself - in English -- whether P is true. And then I talk myself through considerations pro and con P. The upshot of the deliberation is, or feels like anyway, saying to myself "P". Presumably, others are the same.

An additional reason to think that judgment consists in inner assertion would be to make some sense of claims about concepts. Judgment is supposed to be conceptual, while experiential representation is not. Now I'll admit that I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT A CONCEPT IS SUPPOSED TO BE. Some for example, seem to hold that concepts are constituents of thoughts. (If you're a Fregean "concept" probably just is a term of art meant to indicate whatever sort of entity might be part of a thought -- construed as a sense.) One tidy way to organize a lot of the things that people have said about concepts is to link them to natural language: concepts are vocabulary.

Now inner assertion would be a different matter from mere inner utterance. I can say to myself, but without conviction, "Dogs have fins". I have not thereby judged that dogs have fins. On the other hand, I have not exactly asserted it either. I did not say it to myself with conviction.

What about this saying to oneself with conviction? Perhaps the conviction with which one says P to oneself is, as it were, prior to the saying. Perhaps, moreover, the prior conviction is the judgment: First you reach a state of conviction - and thereby judge - and then you inwardly assert. So inward assertion is not judgment, but rather the inward expression of judgment already performed. It is as if inward assertion is like an intentional action, in which we imagine there must be an act of will - a prior state of deciding - which then finds expression in action. Indeed, the view of this paragraph internalizes the Gricean picture of communication: according to which acts of assertion are the expression of a prior Plan of Communication (which is something like a practical syllogism, including what is judged and a plan to effectively replicate that judgment in my audience).

But I worry: the conviction, supposing it is the judgment and prior to its inward expression, seems to be below my conscious radar until such a time as I express it with inward assertion. Can such a thing constitute judgment? That is, can such a thing constitute the end of my conscious deliberation about what is true? It can seem that I am playing catch up with my own judgments: I become aware of them via their manifestation in inward assertion, though they are not something I do. Or, if I count as judging on this picture, I do so by courtesy, as I count as digesting, when my stomach digests, or I sneeze, when my sinuses do their thing.

Consider the Libet-Wegner view of willing, according to which conscious willing is epiphenomenal. The conscious will is like an inner eye that reports - well after the fact - on the activity of the motor cortex. There is the will, the wellspring of action, and then we are along for the ride, merely aware of its action. Here I have decided this! Here I have decided that! But, really, my decisions are mine in the same sense in which my digestion is mine. But this seems all wrong - or, if our willing is like this, then it seems I am not truly the author of my action, but rather a gifted observer of my own decisions... which sucks. [Actually it gets even worse: Wegner marshals tons of evidence that suggests that we are rather bad observers of our own wills - of why we decide and, even, whether we have decided this way or that.]

OK, then, am I committed to the view that judgments are sentential attitudes - rather than propositional attitudes? Does this mean that I think that judgments have narrow contents?

It seems I must conclude that when I think to myself "Fred likes cheese" and when Jacque thinks to himself "Fred aime le fromage" we have made different judgments. Is that a problem? And am I really committed this conclusion? According to the "gricean picture" I sketched above, this conclusion might be troubling, since it might rule out what would count as genuine cross-linguistic communication. I am remain sanguine about this: it is not clear to me why communication must consist in the contagion of the exactly similar judgments.

Note: it needn't be that there is actually, somehow, a sentence in my mind/brain. It is sufficient merely that I go into a state that is like the state of hearing myself assert sentences. No one thinks that "seeing" a blue afterimage requires that there actually be something blue in my mind/brain. It is enough that I go into a state like the state I am in when I see a blue thing. In a certain way, then, judgment would involve extensive aural hallucination. But I don't see why this is a problem. Hallucinating is not always a sign of malfunction: consider, e.g., the sensory imagination and its proper function.

Note: there is nothing here to suggest that beliefs must be the same way. Neither that other non-sentential, judgment-like states cannot be postulated for various purposes.

Apologia

2005-07-18T12:50:00.000-04:00

My dear readers. I fear that I have been distant and chilly. For that, I apologize. These last few months have been a difficult time for me. Grak and I have been fighting -- over what I cannot tell. But we never talk any more. He just looks at my skull and licks his lips. It is super-creepy. I fear things are reaching some kind of conclusion.

But this is no excuse to allow my blogging to fall short of the standards you rightly expect fulfilled.

So...

Some news:

1) I have begun a new semester of teaching introductory philosophy. This has been terrific fun, since I've been teaching epistemology for the first time. It has also been extremely time consuming.

2) My dissertation has been lying prone for several weeks -- see #1 for an explanation. Also, my lap-top was stolen and so I lost a month's worth of my best work in years. Sigh. But I expect a rally soon.

3) I've been involved in some time-consuming personal drama. (Don't ask.)

4) I was working on a 3-beat piece of music -- a la "My Favorite Stuffs" -- but it turned into a Vietnam-style quagmire of polyrhythmic insanity. THE MADNESS HAD TO STOP! (Maybe I'll return to it in several months to prune it down a bit.) How I miss good old-fashioned 4/4 time!

5) Due to my extreme poverty, I've been living on peanut-butter, toast, and vitamin pills. I suspect this is having worrisome effects on my health. For example, I looked at one of my students the other day and I swear he looked just like a delicious turkey sandwich -- with fresh tomatoes, nice mustard, fresh sage and black pepper, on chewy sour-dough... mmm... the girl sitting next to him looked like a nice glass of pale ale. There were crunchy potato chips in a near-by desk.

That is all.

-Idris

Music: My Favorite Stuffs

2005-05-26T20:49:00.000-04:00

So here is a draft of a new tune. I call it "My Favorite Stuffs".

Note the difference between "My Favorite Things" and "My Favorite Stuffs". My song's title does not require of that which counts as my favorite that it should be discrete in time and space. I do like puppies, and mittens, but I also need a song that celebrates my love of paste, tofu, and other non-discrete substances.

I fear I have been warped by philosophy.

Scary Tune #2

2005-05-05T14:45:00.000-04:00

OK... I am not altogether on board with the zingy synthesizer sounds of the 1970s... that is to say: sometimes I think they are great and under-appreciated; other times, I am a little embarrassed to have them in my songs... sigh.

So I stripped out (almost) all the zingy synths and replaced them with a more chamber-music-y sound. Also, I took the Nutcracker-Suite-on-acid melodies from the end and made them the center-piece of the song.

I am pleased as punch and think the new version is much better -- creepier, more interesting, possessing more ...quality.

You're welcome world, by the way.

Here it is, then... I call it: "Could you clean your dishes up next time?"

You'll enjoy it.

Music Blog: Scary New Tune

2005-05-03T18:09:00.000-04:00

So I had a truly phat beat and the core of a similarly funky bass line. I thought I'll make this one genuine make-out music. However, the synthetic strings I decided to play with for this tune just added tension; not sexy tension, mind you, but, rather, the-walls-are-bleeding-(again!) tension. Sigh.

Anyway, this changed things, and I've put together a little tune that makes me think of nothing so much as zombies. So I'll call this one "The Zombie that Followed me Home".

Here it is, then. I hope, dear reader, that you enjoy it.

PS: I'll be tinkering with it a bit in the next few days.

Tymoshenko Update

2005-04-30T17:33:00.000-04:00

Remember my new notional girlfriend, that champion of the people, Yulia Tymoshenko... how her peasant braids nicely compliment the power-suits she now wears.

Anyway, I noticed that someone had come to my blog from Google, having done a search with the following string:

yulia tymoshenko bathing

Give it a Google. It turns out that my blog is the first, among all the websites in the world, that appears in the search results. I feel... famous, special. Thank you blogging!

Deliberatin': Quasi-Enthymemetic Inference

2005-04-24T15:09:00.000-04:00

This post will mainly respond to some of Pugsley's commentary on Skepticism about Deliberation, Part 1. I'll address one of his comments by filling in some detail about one of my worries about direct perceptual judgment.

Pugsley helpfully suggests that inference (as a psychological process) is a causal matter: "I don't see why the distinction [between mere sequence of thoughts and inferences] is different from the distinction between (a) a conjoined pair of events with no causation and (b) an earlier event causing a later event."

To infer is to have at least one thought cause at least one other thought. Call this the Pugsleyan theory.

[Before I start shooting, let me note that clearly something along these lines is right: inference -- understood here as a psychological happening -- is a causal matter. When I conclude that Q, based on some premises, it is causally because of my acceptance of the premises that I conclude that Q. If I hadn't accepted the premises I wouldn't have accepted the conclusion. If I didn't accept the premises, but came to, and then aimed to deduce based on them, I would accept the conclusion. It probably burns calories to infer. If God put a halt to causation, then despite my beginning with the premises I wouldn't continue to the conclusion. etc.]

I have some general, counter-example-y doubts about the Pugsleyan view, but I do not propose to dwell on them. Surely there must be some causal relations between thoughts that do not count as inferences. For example: my desire for cheese might cause me to think that I ought to call Grandma (she was a big fan of cheese, herself). Not an inference. But anyway...

If we accept the Pugsleyan view (strictu dictu), then we cannot maintain a distinction between direct perceptual judgment and inference-based perceptual judgment. Not (anyway) if the direct perceptual judgment is supposed to be formed without judgment. You'll have one state -- the experience -- and causation running from that to a judgment. This will count as an inference on the Pugsleyan account. And so direct perceptual judgment will turn out to be inferential after all.

It is possible that what people meant to focus on was a distinction between judgments based (whether this basing relation counts as inferential or not) on experience alone and judgments based on experience and other judgments or beliefs. Judgments formed on the basis of experience along (and not also on other judgments and beliefs) count as directly perceptual.

But now: note that in attributing inferences to ourselves we often suppose that we've made what I'll call quasi-enthymemetic inferences. Such inferences are enthymemetic in the sense that at the level of conscious thought they move from at least one premise to a conclusion, and yet do so in a way that fails to warrant the conclusion. They are quasi-enthymemetic because a non-occurrent (and hence non-conscious) belief actually functions as a premise -- actually pulls causal weight in whatever way premises do. In a sense, the premise was there all along. But, it seems, our mode of access to that part of our own mentality is theoretical, not introspective (or whatever).

You'll see what I mean by working through an example. Imagine: You think that P, you conclude that Q. You note that actually Q doesn't follow from P. You wonder what could I have been thinking? You note that you believe that R and that if R were cojoined with P, Q follows. (Also R is on the tip of your brain, so to speak.) So you attribute to yourself an quasi-enthymemetic inference: my belief that R must have played a premise-like role in getting me to think that Q.

Candidates for cases of directly perceptual judgments run the danger of also being cases of quasi-enthymemetic judgment. Where there are rational gaps there is reason to suppose that quasi-enthymemetic judgment has occurred. [We are finite creatures, of course, and so that is not always true: there are going to transitions we simply make, but I am prepared to argue that we are not yet at the bottom of rationalizing explanation].

If what you judge has the same content as your experience, then there will be no pressure to postulate a quasi-enthymemetic inference. But there is abundant reason to suppose that there are deep semantic differences between experiences and judgments. Judgments are conceptual, while experiences are not. Judgments are content-wise precise while experiences are not. (I can judge of one thing and a single property that it bears that property, while the same is not true of experience. Experience always represents a hugely open-ended plenitude of properties and a large number of individuals.) etc.

So there is abundant reason to think that transitions from experience to judgment are always semantic leaps. So there is abundant reason to suppose that transitions from experience to judgment are rational leaps.

Consideration of content aside, judgment is answerable to the whole of our beliefs, while experience isn't (because (i) it ain't agential and (ii) anyway it is immune to the authority of belief). So I am ready, when I judge on the basis of my experience, to reject my experience: to look again, more closely, to rub my eyes, etc. In the case of illusions, all I can do is refuse to believe. Anyway, this readiness to reject suggests two things: first, that the transition from experience to judgment is by itself a rational leap; second, that the transition from experience to judgment is plausibly subject to non-conscious monitoring. When I do judge on the basis of my experience it will be because I have accepted that, at least in this case, things are likely to be as they appear.

Summing up: since there is reason to suppose that transitions from experience to judgment are always risky, and anyway, always under the supervision of the tribune of our belief set, there is reason to suppose that these transitions are quasi-enthymemetic and so not formed on the basis of experience alone.

There is more to be said, of course. I have not addressed much of what Pugsley had to say and have, I am certain, created more problems for myself. But Sunday is short and the guilt of not dissertating is catching up.

It Ain't Robots (But still...)

2005-04-22T15:24:00.000-04:00

Check out this bit of science news for some inspiration.

Welcome to the future: for your comfort, we will soon be placing you in suspended animation for the duration of the flight to Jupiter. Please put the mask over your mouth and nose and breath normally.

"By using a small amount of hydrogen sulfide gas [, researchers put] mice into a state of hibernation for six hours. ...Overall, their metabolic rate dropped by 90 percent -- meaning normal cellular activity slowed to almost a standstill, thus reducing the need for oxygen. ...Fresh air revived the mice, and testing uncovered no differences in behavior or functional ability between the treated mice and untreated ones, the study concluded."

This looks like garage-ready science. I think I might try to put my housemate into hibernation. I just need a tank of oxygen, a tank of hydrogen sulfide, and some anesthesiology equipment. Come over next Thursday for a demonstration! We'll have drinks and once ___ is in a state of hibernation, put him into funny manikin poses. It'll be a blast.

Skepticism About Deliberation Part 1

2005-04-20T16:27:00.000-04:00

Poor Shawn. I think I suggested (OK "promised" might be a better word) that I would say something about equal protection clauses and their import. So Shawn -- a Michigan-trained lawyer -- was sharpening her knives in preparation for shredding what naive things I would say on the topic. Sadly, she won't get to use them on me. I won't be posting on equal protection. Life is short, the law is long, and I have very tender skin. On the other hand, now she has a nice shiny set of razor-sharp blades to use on someone else.

That aside: Here is a perennially interesting thing: deduction. I have long been interested in gaps in thought, in ways our cognitive lives are gappy (in a sense to be explained). Some gaps in our cognitive lives are boring. For example: I zoned out this afternoon while I was "writing" my dissertation. Nothing happened mentally for, like, five minutes. Some gaps, however, are pregnant gaps: gaps that are nonetheless part of our mental lives. These are interesting gaps because you might wonder in what sense such gaps are part of our personal mental lives.

Maybe you'll get the idea when I turn to the topic at hand, inferencing. Here is a sequence of thoughts:

I like aged Gouda.
That is an aged Gouda.
If I like an aged Gouda, I should take it.
I shall take the aged Gouda.

A moment later, after the sequence of thoughts, I took the cheese and split. Zingermann's never knew what hit them. Silly, slow hippies! Now I have 5 pounds of aged Gouda and they don't. Thank you deduction!

I acted for reasons -- my preference for aged Gouda, the availability of aged Gouda -- I also acted on account of having reasoned a certain way -- having reasoned on the basis of my reasons. Part of the explanation/justification for my action is not just that I had certain preferences and made certain judgments, but also that those got together in such a way as to yield a conclusion about what to do. The got together in an inferential way. So if you ask "why did you take the cheese?", one thing I can do to answer your question is note that taking the cheese was the upshot of some reasoning.

But their getting together in an inferential way is a gappy matter: my having inferred is not witnessed in some thought-like occurrence in my mind. My having inferred seems to have been a matter, rather, of transitions between thoughts.

Sometimes (it is true) transitions between thoughts are accompanied by conscious markers of inference-making. I might, for example, have thought So, as a consequence of all of that, I shall take the aged Gouda. But this does not always happen when we draw inferences and anyway, even if it does, my having inferred does not consist in the occurrence of such conscious inference-markers.

On some wacky philosopher's whim, I might decide to free associate about aged Gouda (doesn't matter what thoughts I think so long as they are Gouda-related).

Here is one possible result of that whim:

I like aged Gouda.
That is an aged Gouda.
If I like an aged Gouda, I should take it.
So, as a consequence, I shall take the aged Gouda.

In such a case, I may very well not have performed a deduction. The last thought might merely have been the last in a sequence of Gouda-related thoughts. Any Gouda-related thought would have done as well, for example the negation of the last thought.

What would explain how two intrinsically identical sequences of thought might differ such that one is a chain of reasoning and the other is not?

Hypothesis: different answers to this question will tend to make it difficult to understand how one knows one is reasoning rather than merely entertaining sequences of thought. There are similar worries about rational agency: if rationality rests in the gaps, then how is it me who reasons? It might be most fruitful to pursue these questions via a kind of skeptical worry: maybe I don't have justification for supposing that I've been reasoning! Maybe I never once reasoned in my life! You're no better off, either.

This post might sound like procrastination in action. Indeed, the clock is ticking loudly in my ear and this is not quite my dissertation. But it turns out that there are interesting connections to the theory of perception. One mainstream constraint on theories of perception and perceptual experience is that they provide the basis for a theory of direct perceptual judgment: judgment made solely on the basis of perceptual experience. That a judgment be a direct perceptual judgment is a matter of its being non-inferential. But answers to the primary question (what is it to infer?) are, likely, going to make it hard to maintain the existence of such a category of judgment.

Also, it is my hunch, answers to the question of what counts as an inference will get us into wacky kripkenstenian waters: fraught with rational idealizations, interpretivism, normativity, principles of charity, and the like. Wacky is good, though. So, I conclude, my excitement is justified.

More later.

Batter my heart, three-person'd God...

2005-04-11T13:09:00.000-04:00

So I was re-reading Phillip K. Dick's The Transmigration of Timothy Archer and came across this little gem of a poem. Normally, to be honest, I skip any poem I see in a novel (like I tend to skip formalizations), but I was sleepy and kept reading. It turns out to be a Phantastickal poem.

HOLY SONNETS.

XIV.

Batter my heart, three-person'd God ; for you
As yet but knock ; breathe, shine, and seek to mend ;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force, to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp'd town, to another due,
Labour to admit you, but O, to no end.
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captived, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,
But am betroth'd unto your enemy ;
Divorce me, untie, or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

-John Donne

Quite something, eh? "That I may rise, and stand, overthrow me, and bend your force to break blow, burn, and make me new. ...I, except you enthrall me, never shall be free. Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me." ...Super sweet.

I wonder if the rest of the sonnets are similarly good...

PS: The Transmigration of Timothy Archeris probably Dick's best. Like all of his best novels, it is set in Berkeley in the late 70s/early 80s among the detritus of the failed 1960s. It is amusingly cracked -- full of madness and fringe religion. Unlike, say, Neil Stephenson, the madness is not presented in the spirit of fun high-jinx, but, rather, as simultaneously tragically fated and intelligibly alluring. The novel, rather nicely, swings between presenting the wackiness as madness and as fictionally true. Also he manages to have his characteristic shortcomings as an author (crack-pot-ism coupled with intellectual pretentions) come across as flaws in the narrator and not as flaws in his style.

You should read it right now, especially if you're in the mood for a novel about death and suffering. With the spring weather, we all need to nip any dawning optimism with realistic gloom.

Music Blog: Three Decades Hump

2005-03-27T15:58:00.000-05:00

Sorry, dear reader, for the delay in music-blogging, but... well... things have been busy 'round here. There is more in the pipeline, I promise.

Here is a little something-something I like to call "Three Decades Hump". It is in the genre called "sweet Jesus, is that funky!". The idea is this: three decades (the 70s, 80s, and 90s) mated to produce this super-sweet and oh-so-groovy piece of chamber music. It morphs cleanly through several distinct (totally rad) modes of groove.

Anyway: check it out. Seriously.

Robots!

2005-03-24T15:46:00.000-05:00

So I've noticed that DailyAkrasia is turning into a robot fansite -- when it isn't going on about Canada (yawn)... I'd like to encourage this robo-facination among the droogs.

Dear reader, check out the following news article for more evidence of the coming transformation of Japan into a republic of artificial persons:

"Humanoids are really exciting..."

Tell me about it, dude! Most of my greatest loves in life have been humanoids... Though Robby's parents' friends are not so discriminating, it turns out.

Gay Marriage, Part 1

2005-03-21T13:39:00.000-05:00

And so it happened, dear reader, that I was going to add my voice to the cacophony regarding the recent gay marriage decision in California. And yet discovered that Evan Kirchhoff, a sensible lad, had already posted two very interesting analyses on his blog. So check them out.

Evan buys the judge's equal protection rationale for overturning California's law against gay marriage. In his most recent, he adds some very interesting commentary on the possible motivations for government regulation of coupling behavior. Even more interestingly, he postulates widespread bad-faith on this matter.

Where I stand:

1) I'll admit to being a little leery of equal protection arguments generally, as I am not convinced that the dominant American judicial tradition understands equal protection clauses in the proper way. I plan on posting on this soon.

2) On the other hand, the judge's reasoning seems to conform with that tradition, so precendent-relativists about appropriate judicial review can rest easy. In light of this fact, I am willing to remain in suspense regarding the leeriness I advert to in (1).

3) I'd like to post on the teleology of sexual relationships and what consequences this might have for the law and morality. As it happens, I'll assert that sexuality is, in some sense, intrinsically reproductive and so, in some sense, essentially hetero-sexuality. Indeed, I take it that properly understood this claim blindingly obvious. But I'll go on to assert that hardly anything interesting follows from this. If you should happen to prefer having your nipples tickled with ostriche feathers to reproductively appropriate sex, then go nuts. Morally Permitted Pleasure Town has room for people just like you! Additionally, that heterosex constitutes a kind of norm doesn't support the contention that people who romantically bond homosexually should be forbidden to marry. Stay tuned, dear reader.

Sense-Data and Mind Dependence

2005-03-18T14:36:00.000-05:00

Here is how the Stanford Encyclopedia (SEP) defines sense data theory: Every case in which we see is a case in which we are aware of sense data. Which are defined by the following:

we are directly aware of in perception,
is dependent on the mind, and
has the properties that perceptually appear to us.

We are only aware of non-mind dependent things by being aware of sense data, which are mental things and could not be other than they appear. I think the view characterized above could use some dusting off, some reconstruction.

In this post I propose to begin doing that. I'd like to present what I take the central claim of sense-data theory to be and work toward refining it.

SEP characterizes sense-data theory as a view in the first instance about seeing. But this might be misleading. Sense-data theory is probably best understood as a theory about the metaphysics of experience. As I understand it, the central claim of the sense-data theorist is this: episodes of experience are to be reduced to episodes of seeing. In particular, episodes of experience are to be reduced to episodes of being sensorily aware (in a visual way) of sense data. So, on the sense-data theorist's view, experiences take their structure from episodes of seeing. Note that this inverts the standard view, according to which seeing and experiencing are rather different things and seeings are, as it were, built out of experiences (plus some other stuff).

At any rate, according to sense data theory canonical types of visual experience are identical to canonical types of seeings. The thesis is supposed to have some kind of explanatory punch. Consider a straightforward case. Child: "Why does it seem like this when I see the giraffe, mommy?" Mommy: "Because, dearest, you bear the seeing relation to a particular that possesses such and such features." Child: "Ah yes ...it is all clear now."

Types of Experience

Imagine seeing a giraffe in Tanner Library. In such a case you'd be subject to some kind of visual experience. It is plausible to suppose that it is possible to be subject to the very same experience if you were hallucinating a giraffe, seeing a similar but distinct giraffe, or misperceiving Rob Gressis as a giraffe. That is, it is plausible to suppose that the class of indistinguishable experiences shared by episodes of seeing, hallucinating, and misperceiving witness a canonical type of experience. Suppose that these possible experiences form a canonical type of experience. The sense data theorist will then go on to claim that in each of these cases tokening the experience consists in tokening the same type of seeing.

Types of Seeing

When I see, I see a particular and its features. Suppose that it is essential to the identity of an episode of seeing that it is a seeing of x and x's properties. Every counterpart of a seeing of x must be a seeing of a counterpart of x and that counterpart's features. And so, if canonical types of experience are to be reduced to canonical types of seeings, we get the following view: To have an experience is essentially to bear the seeing relation to a particular and its features.

Now if the hallucination of the giraffe and the seeing of the giraffe, and the seeing of a distinct but similar giraffe token the same canonical type of experience, then that experience cannot consist in a seeing of the giraffe (or not an actual giraffe anyway) and its properties. Sense data are whatever can fill this role. They're particulars that even hallucinators can bear the seeing relation to. Moreover, they're particulars that can possess the features that are revealed in perception.

The Stanford encyclopedia requires that sense data be mental things. This is probably wrong. One is tempted to suppose that sense data are mental in the way that one is tempted to suppose that abstract objects or fictional entities are mental. ...which is to say, at this point in philosophical history, not very tempted.

Some possibilities:

Sense-data are possibilia.

Sense-data are abstract actual particulars.

One might have general scruples about trade in abstracta. I propose to ignore those scruples. In believing, I bear some relation a proposition. In deliberating, I bear some relation to a rule of inference. In being one of five, I bear some relation to a number. If experience turns out to be an awareness relation to some abstracta... great. I don't see any reason right now why awareness relations must take concreta as their relata.

One worry about this view is that it isn't clear to me that abstracta can bear, for example, color properties or location properties.

Another Worry:

I think we could tell a story about how thinkers could get in the business of trade with certain abstracta. Causation, for example, seems to be a relation between states of affairs, or facts, or events. One attraction of causal theories of content is that they provide a way of seeing how certain kinds of abstracta could enter into the best explanation of our mental lives. By being causally related to facts, your thinking gets to be all fact-y.

But if sense-data are not the kind of abstracta that have clear natural analogs -- as facts are natural, but abstract, analogs of propositions -- then we cannot tell the above kind of story about how our visual systems end up being best described in terms of them.

Some Varieties of Belief (Sketchy Preview)

2005-03-06T14:26:00.000-05:00

What is the scope for intellectual explanations of human behavior? Should we give intellectual explanations of, for example, dog behavior?

Boring Types of Belief:

1) Occurrent Belief: conscious acts of judgment... you say to yourself "P". [How far can we take the thought that these are really inner speech acts?] These are events, rather than states.

2) Dispositional Belief: non-conscious dispositions to conscious acts of judgment. These are states, rather than events.

Non-Boring:

1) Non-conscious judgment: Invoked in cases like the slip of the tongue. It is as if you said to yourself "P", but without having done so. There must be an mental event (hence, this is judgment-like) in order to actuate behavior, but there is no consciousness of it.

2) (?) Semi-Conscious judgment: Invoked in cases in which you do not say to yourself "P", but in which something event-like has occurred, but which event is not exactly non-conscious.

Example: you're checking problem sets for logic. You move quickly, glancing to match answers with the key. You look at an answer, you think "OK" and move on. I think there is a belief here -- something like "this answer matches the answer provided in the key". However, do you not say to yourself "this answer matches the answer provided in the key." Is this just a case of non-conscious judgment?

Another case: you perform an inference (in inner speech) that turns on Modus Ponens -- though you do not say to yourself the content of the rule. It seems that something like a belief in Modus Ponens has actuated your inference -- if so there is reason to suppose that something judgment-like has occurred. Are cases like this just cases in which we want to postulate non-conscious judgments?

Up is Down

2005-02-19T18:09:00.000-05:00

The claim is this: Up is down. But, mildly surprisingly, down is not up.

Anyone who disagrees with me on this matter is probably a child-molester or crypto-Nazi.

Cheers,
-Idris

Self-Knowledge as Practical Knowledge

2005-02-17T20:29:00.000-05:00

So one way in which our self-knowledge is going to be wacky is that it is going to involve self-luminous mental states.

I'd like to continue by focusing on wacky mode of self-knowledge #2: Practical Knowledge. By way of connection to the prior topic: could practical knowledge explain self-luminosity?

Richard Moran suggests that some of our non-inferential knowledge of our own belief is what might be called practical knowledge.

I (normally) know what I am about to do, in virtue of deciding to do it. This is a matter of several things. First, my decision makes it true that what I will do is intentional in some respect rather than others. So, that I have decided to serve my guests fish makes my action intentional with respect to being a fish serving. If my action should also be a guest poisoning, since (unbeknownst to me) the fish is off, it won't be intentional in that respect. Since certain features of my action are constitutively determined by my decision, I can, simply in virtue of having decided as I did know about those features. Second, a la Velleman, since I will normally do whatever I decide to do, my decision to act can constitute knowledge. Decisions have a belief-like face. Suppose, then that to decide is to represent my future being one way or other. This belief-like state is warranted because, since I will do whatever I decide, I have a license to represent my future in whatever way it is I do represent it in deciding to act. That my belief-like state is so licensed implies that it is knowledge. [By the way, this is my understanding of the take-home message of Velleman's account of the feeling of free-will.]

Moran thinks that occurrent belief is like action. I know what I occurrently believe, because my occurrent believing is agential... at least in normal cases. I am not very sure what this means. I suspect it means something along these lines: we decide what to believe, just as we decide how to act, and so if decisions to act constitute a special kind of knowledge, then so must decisions to believe.

Short Digression:

Note #1: It is often remarked that one cannot decide to believe with quite the same freedom as one can decide to act. Some have denied that there is any doxastic freedom. Obviously, reasons for belief govern believing in a way that differs markedly from reasons for action. But it is an open question in my mind whether these considerations will defeat a Moran-like account.

Note #2: Practical knowledge is confined to the Good Case. It might be that I find myself alienated from my own beliefs. Maybe some forms of madness involve this. Note that in the alienated state one's knowledge of one's own beliefs is more like one's knowledge of others' beliefs. Ah, this is what I must believe! ...or that is what the therapist tells me, anyway. Anyway, in such a non-Good Case, I won't have practical knowledge of my own beliefs.

End Digression.

Obviously, Moran's cannot be the whole story (even if it is correct). I clearly have a kind of non-inferential knowledge of my own decisions. But it ain't clear to me that our knowledge of our own decisions could itself be constituted by a decision to decide in such-and-such a way. If the model of practical knowledge is to be applied to our awareness of our own decisions, it requires that our decisions be known in virtue of being decided. While I am pretty sure I consciously decide to do things, I am not so sure that I ever decide to decide. If not, then we need non-practical explanation for the self-knowledge we have of our own decisions.

(There is probably also a regress problem here.)

Thus, even if deciding grants a kind of non-inferential knowledge, we still have a kind of non-inferential knowledge left over.

At the very least, self-luminosity cannot be explained as practical knowledge. If our decisions are self-luminous, they aren't so in virtue of being 2nd order decided.

Secondly, there are states that are plausible candidates for self-luminosity, but that are not decision-governed. Take being in pain. I can't choose to feel pain. [OK: I can, but the way in which I choose pain is rather different from the way in which I might choose to act... hands are waived.] Yet it seems that pain is especially inapt for treatment on a quasi-perceptual model. So pain is plausibly self-luminous. Yet its luminosity cannot consist in having been decided upon... since it was not decided upon. QED

Self-Luminous Mental States

2005-02-17T19:19:00.000-05:00

It is commonly enough remarked that our knowledge of our own beliefs and deliberations is unlike our knowledge of the beliefs and deliberations of others. The case of occurrent stream-of-thought believing and deliberating exemplifies these asymmetries. (On the other hand, your knowledge of your own non-conscious beliefs and deliberations is qualitatively similar to your knowledge of others'.)

How do we know about our own conscious beliefs and deliberations? Begin with the thought that our knowledge of our own conscious belief and deliberation is non-inferential. This is mainly a negative thought: however it happens, we have an access to our own mind that is non-theoretical. For example, I do not usually realize that I believe that P (where this is a conscious belief) by concluding, based on some evidence, that a belief that P would best explain my own behavior or some such.

(I normally do this in the case of my own non-conscious beliefs, assuming there are such. But note that this is what I also do in the case of others' beliefs.)

Wacky Form of Self-Knowledge #1) Quasi-Perceptual Access:

One can imagine that our knowledge of our own minds is quasi-perceptual, since it ain't inferential and perception is a paradigm for non-inferential access to the facts. But there are regress worries here.

Paraphrasing Ryle from memory: I might say "it came to me in a flash that I believed that P". I knew that I believed that P in virtue of this flash. But now, one might wonder, what was the character of this flash? It seems that, in the moment it occurred, I knew I had such a flash without the benefit of inference. How did I know I was subject to it (the flash of insight into my beliefs)? It had better not be that we must postulate another flash -- one in virtue of which I knew of my flash. End paraphrase.

Suppose that quasi-perceptual access to the facts requires that I have an experience of them. Thus, if I have quasi-perceptual access to the facts of my own mind, then I must have an experience of those facts. You might worry that unless this experience is something to which we have conscious access, then it could not deliver the requisite self-access. But then, we must postulate another experience... and so on.

At a certain point, it seems, some mental state must simply constitute my non-inferential awareness of my own mind, not itself requiring another mental state to bring it into awareness. It constitutes my being aware.

Such states are self-luminous. That is supposed to be intentionally provocative, b'zatch!

This is the same kind of regress worry we get about the role of rules in deliberation. I might infer that P based on some considerations. (I begin by thinking to myself: "Ah yes, X, Y, and Z".).

I also use a rule that tells me that given those considerations, P follows. (I think to myself: "Well, given X, Y, and Z and the rule that things of this sort license the conclusion that P... P.)

I take it that this sometimes happens. However, it cannot be the case that every rule that governs my inferences is explicitly represented as a premise. In the end, I'll need some rule that gets my premises together and spits out a conclusion. So suppose I have drawn an inference. In what lies my confidence that my conclusion follows? I can point to my premises, and any rules explicitly represented therein. But at a certain point, my account will have to stop listing rules. [OK: this needs some serious precisification. But something along these lines is clearly right. See: Achilles and Tortoise.]

Deliberation must have a self-luminous nature.

Also note how wacky a quasi-perceptual account of our knowledge of our own deliberation would be. In what does my license to believe that P consist? Well: I observed a process in my mind, which involved, first, thinking X, Y, and Z. And next thinking P, which was accompanied by a feeling of conclusive-ness. So something that happened in my mind licenses the belief that P. So P. This is crazy.

The Horror

2005-02-16T15:39:00.000-05:00

Some things have to be seen to be believed.

This is one of those wonderful things.

*Don't worry. Watching it in a public place is OK.

Music Blog: Graksong

2005-02-11T22:09:00.000-05:00

So Grak gave me another song to listen to. It is called "Dance of the Grak-Maidens". Does it sound Spanish to you Rob?

I'll admit: the drums sound quite a bit like the ones from "All Praise the Hypno-Toad". Maybe it is the traditional rhythm of Grak's homeland. And then there is the terrifying blare of... well, whatever that instrument is -- just as in the other song.

Anyway, here it is. I hope you enjoy it, dear reader.

My Housemate, Grak

2005-02-11T17:07:00.000-05:00

So I've been getting questions about my housemate, Grak... I don't know him very well. Our schedules are rather different. To be honest, I am not sure I want to know what he's up to. So, for example, I haven't actually gotten around to checking out his blog.

I can't put my finger on it, but there is something rather strange about him.

I am pretty sure he's a foreigner of some sort (maybe Spanish?). I caught him looking at my head in a funny way the other day. (I'd swear there was a special gleam in his eye.) Do Spaniards do this?

But as to his favorite books and such, I have no idea. Oh! He does seem to like TV quite a bit. If I see him at all, it is normally in the TV room. He seems awfully fond of the soaps... and Friends.

He is a little strange (but who isn't?), but he is a fine housemate. He always remembers to clean up the Kitchen after he uses it. Also, just the other day he brought me some tea-tree oil from work. Grak works at an Aveda salon. He said the oil would help calm the stress he expected I would feel. Pretty considerate, eh? Also he's always suggesting that I eat more fresh fish. Evidently, fish is full of Omega-3 fatty acids, which are good for your brain.

Music Blogging: Hypno-Toad

2005-02-10T21:08:00.000-05:00

Here is a tune I like to call "All Praise the Hypno-Toad"... well, actually, my housemate Grak told me to call it that. He says his mom used to hum it to him to help put him to sleep.

Grak is a pretty weird dude, if you ask me... but that is another matter for another day. Check out the song. You won't regret it... mwah-hah-ha...

A Little Cool Science

2005-02-06T14:08:00.000-05:00

Perhaps you read the Kim Stanley Robinson series of novels: Red Mars, Green Mars, and Blue Mars. If so, you'll find this bit of science news especially amusing:

Greenhouse gases could breathe life into Mars

Those novels, by the way, are a great read; though you have to wade through a certain amount of hippie-silliness. That aside, I definitely recommend you read them, if you enjoy thinking about multinational corporations, political revolution, God-like technological powers, sustainable development, and planetary colonization.

My New (Notional) Girlfriend

2005-02-04T14:51:00.000-05:00

Oh Yulia Tymoshenko! You have been an oligarch, and an advocate for people power. Now you are the new Prime Minister of the Ukraine. But you can also be the Prime Minister of my heart!

Would you consider running for office here in the states? ...perhaps ditching your family for a love-struck graduate student? I can be very charming and I have long opposed the Russo-phile policies of Leonid Kuchma.

Maybe a letter-writing campaign is called for, comrades. Check out her personal website.

A boy has to dream a little.

Grand Distinction #2

2005-02-03T16:56:00.000-05:00

Frankfurt claims that the mere fact that one cares about a thing endows it with value. In The Contours of Agency he constantly harps on his critics for supposing that value must be constituted by subject-external facts. Presumably, however, he shouldn't deny that in some sense caring about a thing involves representing it as endowed with independent value. On the other hand, if caring is to create the values it (in some sense) represents then it needs to have intrinsic features which do not so represent. Otherwise, it would be opaque how such a state could create value. The theory that caring creates value really would be like the theory that true for me is a kind of truth. Since it seems that caring does create value, there must be more to caring than representing a thing as care-worthy.

Here we see another Grand Distinction in the philosophical tradition.

It is not contained to the case of value, of course. Consider response-dependence theories of color. On these theories to be colored C, is to be such as to provoke a kind of response in creatures like us (suitably idealized, under suitably idealized conditions). On such a theory it had better be the case that the response in terms of which the theory is given does not itself represent something as being colored C. On the other hand, presumably, it must be recognized that in some sense our visual system represents things as being colored C. At any rate, what we have here is a theory like Frankfurt's: a state which represents things as being some way (valuable, colored) gets its apt-ness by reference to some state of human responding which cannot -- on pain of circularity -- consist in representing things as bearing the property in question.

Skip the following paragraph if you're in a hurry.

OK, so there is some response to things that is supposed to endow those things with a property P. That response cannot simply consist in representing things as P. It is possible that the relevant response represents things as Q. In which case certain kinds of representational facts will ground the facts in light of which some representational contents are apt. So for example: maybe the color-fixing response of the ideal responder consists in representing things as visually similar (though in no specific way). That an ideal responder would respond in this way fixes the facts about color. Maybe my caring represents things as liked by me and it is in virtue of this fact that it creates facts about value.

But I'd like to set this aside for a moment. The alternative explanation is going to have to invoke something like qualia: intrinsic, non-intentional mental states.

So here is the Grand Distinction: Some theories postulate non-intentional states of people, which states, crucially, are partially constitutive of one's mental life -- and not in the way in which brain states are supposed to constitute one's mental life, but in a stronger way (like an occurrent belief partially constitutes one's mental life).

But there is a tradition of hostility to this kind of claim. I have to admit to being party to it. When possible see our mental lives as ways of taking things as being thus-and-so. When possible see our mental lives as basically content-driven.

Of course, there are bad reasons for allegiance to this tradition. For example: you might think that skeptical problems (or something like them) will be especially pressing if our mental lives are importantly constituted by non-intentional states. Intentional states launch our thinking at the world, non-intentional states would keep our thinking directed at itself. ...as if my thinking consisted in a stream of pretty pictures, none of which so much as purported to picture my local environment. This is all pretty silly. (Put the pieces together yourself.)

There are better reasons for allegiance, though. For example: try to isolate some feature of your conscious life that cannot be construed as a representation of the world one way or another. The sensations accompanying orgasm are sometimes supposed to be candidates for such states. But a literature exists suggesting (with some phenomenological plausibility, speaking for myself) that these sensations really represent various stirrings in the lower regions. A little good muscle tension here, a little better muscle tension there, etc. Have the qualia-freaks ever had an orgasm?!

Still... Frankfurt's position seems true. There does seem to be something right about the claim that caring about something makes it valuable in a way that it wasn't before. And if this claim can best be explained by reference to something qualia-like, then...

So a to do list:

1) Punch a certain Remy in the face -- thereby expressing only affection, of course.

2) See how the details of Frankfurt's position work out.

3) Consider theories that construe qualia-like features as really intentional.

4) Ask: what is the use of content such that one ought prefer accounts according to which the mark of the mental is intentionality?

5) Be sure there is a general split here. Do theories as diverse as Frankfurt's and the ideal response theory of color really fall into a philosophical kind?

6) Remember to eat and shower regularly.

Willing, Sensing, and The Boundaries of The Self

2005-02-03T15:18:00.000-05:00

Who am I? What constitutes the core of my life? I don't mean this to be a question about identity across time, but rather a question about the boundaries of my core (that which is most truly me) at a particular time.

There are two (interesting) kinds of answers to this, or so it strikes me, in the philosophical tradition. First, I am most essentially my willing self. Second, I am most essentially my sentient self. The boundaries of me are defined by the scope of my consciousness. If you wanted to list the events that constitute the history of my life -- whatever relation binds these events together into a single history rather than a series of histories -- you could give pride of place to my will and the things consequent upon it or you could give pride of place to the events constituting what it had been like to be me. Or: you could be forgiven for doing so, given your exposure to the philosophical tradition.

Consider moral theory.

The Kantian suggests that properly respecting the kinds of creatures we are requires responding to our volitional nature -- in the Kantian tradition this is understood to be our reason. That we are choosers is what drives morality. The utilitarian seems to suppose that properly respecting the kinds of creatures we are requires responding to our capacities for being conscious in various ways (by experiencing suffering or pleasure). That we are sentient is what drives morality, on this kind of theory.

I'd guess that moral theory is just one place where this pops up. The literature on the peculiarities of self-knowledge is pretty hairy, but it represents a similar divide. You might think that we have a mode of access to our own beliefs that is like our mode of access to our own actions. We know what we are about to do because we have made up our minds to do it. Likewise, we know what we believe (when we are believing occurrently) because we have made up our minds regarding how things are. On the other hand, you might suppose that we know what we believe (when we are believing occurrently) because we have special introspective access to some of our beliefs. We see ourselves believing, as it were. So what is going on there?

On any reasonable view, of course, there will be Interesting Relations between our willing and our sensory lives. First, let me note that it is not clear to what extent we should take these two understandings of the core as competitors. Moreover, there will be Interesting Relations between our core (whatever that is) and our periphery (which is nonetheless part of us). I have beliefs that are non-conscious, presumably. In virtue of what similarities to beliefs that are part of my core do these count as beliefs?

Also, I have said nothing about what giving pride of place to our willing nature might consist in. I have relied instead on our having a pre-theoretical grasp on this. But what, after all, is the interest of describing some feature of myself as constitutive of what is truly me?

I think there are Very Interesting Questions here. For example: how does our practice of belief fit in with this stuff? It might seem as if I can will arbitrarily. But my beliefs are not so unconstrained. This is plausibly both a contingent feature of my believing and a constitutive feature of my believing. On the other hand, there is, as we say, room for judgment in our beliefs. And we are held responsible for our beliefs in ways that seem to presuppose that our believing is will-governed. So how does doxastic activity relate to the core on the assumption that the core is will-constituted?

Interesting Question #2 (and one that doesn't seem much represented in the literature): Why are people (laymen) always going on about the conscious will? Is the will not essentially conscious? And if so, how does being conscious (aware) of what might have been an unconscious thing help anyone? "I am responsible for punching Remy in the face because I was aware of myself choosing it." (!!)

A Connoisseur of Procrastination

2005-02-01T14:07:00.000-05:00

Do you have 15 minutes to spare from your busy life? I thought so. This next particular 15 minutes is hardly the blink of an eye in what is, after all, a long week... on a cosmic scale: nothing at all.

Here, therefore, is something for you:

The universe is destined to end. Before it does, could an advanced civilisation escape via a "wormhole" into a parallel universe? The idea seems like science fiction, but it is consistent with the laws of physics and biology. Here's how to do it...

Cheers,
-Idris

Doxastic Autonomy: A Preview

2005-01-29T16:28:00.000-05:00

Can the value in philosophy consist in part in its contribution to something that might be called "Doxastic Autonomy" -- where philosophy would generate this value independently of its value as a source of knowledge? It can produce knowledge, let's suppose, and that is a Very Good Thing, but it can also produce doxastic autonomy.

I have sometimes thought that one good reason to do philosophy is it allows for gaining a kind of ownership over central features of our believing lives. It might be that I began my adult life knowing that P, and I continue to know it, and never ceased to know it. But now, having engaged in thought about foundational issues, I can take special responsibility for my belief that P, while before I couldn't. This talk of ownership suggests close connections to agential concepts.

You also might join Nagel (see The View from Nowhere) in being moved by certain analogies between skepticism and hard determinism to think that our doxastic lives can be defective in virtue of being non-autonomous. The skeptic and the hard determinist both often proceed by showing that we are in the relevant respects leaves on the wind.

I am pretty suspicious of this stuff, though. Partly, the problem has to do with disanalogies between acting/deciding and believing. The will is involved in each in different ways, and you might expect that this has consequences for the applicability of the concept of autonomy. But I think there is something here... so expect more on this soon!

Grace

2005-01-29T14:54:00.000-05:00

I saw it in a video:

A weird eclipse light shines over Southern California in the mid-seventies. Among the ruinous detritus of the previous decade, beautiful feral children skate in dry swimming pools.

Don't look over your shoulder. Snarl cool defiance. Soar up over the pool's edge, twist, and whirl back down again. Display amazing feats of arbitrary skill. You are punk before your time.

Again up to the edge.

I think: the world holds its breath for you. Go!

But what you don't know (and won't discover for years) is that since you tumbled from your mother's womb you've been falling -- and won't stop.

This is what no one says.

A Remembrance

2005-01-28T15:10:00.000-05:00

Being Five Years Old

One Sunday, after church, I went to sleep in a drowsy sunspot on the rug in my parents' bedroom.

I flattened myself close to the floor - since the warmth hovered only a few inches above it - and looked sideways at the kitten that joined me in the light. Her white fuzz was blindingly over-exposed against the carpet's dark arabesques.

Down the hall (very far away), my brother practiced Fur Elise on the piano: stopping, starting, stopping, starting again.

At a certain point, as I fell asleep, the orange light that shone through my eyelids must have blinked out. Hard to say when.

Later, I tried to describe to my family the dream I'd had: There was a girl and on her head were stacked the following items: a cup and saucer, a grey dove, some pots and pans, and a loaf of bread.

Music Blog: Tradeoff

2005-01-25T18:13:00.000-05:00

"Tradeoff" is little tune and the fruit of this last weekend's labors. It is un-utterably funky. I call it "Tradeoff" in light of the way it trades various extremely funky chops to and fro between a flute, an electric piano, and what sounds like a de-tuned guitar (but which is really a synthesized upright bass uptuned two octaves).

Here it is.

A Short Argument: Modal, Schmodal!

2005-01-24T13:00:00.000-05:00

Since other possible worlds are spatio-temporally distinct from our own, how things are at another possible world can have no causal influence on our own. Since how things are at another possible world can have no causal influence on our own world, our world would be the way it is no matter how things were at other possible worlds. So our world is the way it is, no matter how things are at other possible worlds.

Obviously something funny is going on here and it probably has something to do with ways our world is. For example, the modal facts -- which sure seem to be ways our world is -- would change with many alterations in how things are at other possible worlds. And a lot of philosophical ink has been spilled in showing how facts that don't seem to be modal facts really are modal -- e.g. causal facts, facts about knowledge, perception and the like. How things are with other possibilities matters more than Grandma might have supposed. So we have reason to believe the argument is unsound.

...and yet...

Imagine, however, that God has the power to change what is possible -- perhaps only for restricted forms of possibility. Suppose, then, that every 10 seconds he institutes changes in the local modal neighborhood such that what is now nomologically possible becomes nomologically impossible. Yet He leaves our world intrinsically untouched. Lots of things would be in flux: the laws of nature (by definition), the causal facts (what causes one thing in one 10 second span will cease to exert causal influence the next), the "epistemic" facts (we'll shift from knowing/perceiving many things to not).

On the other hand, from our perspective (I strongly intuit), nothing will shift. Since these changes are changes that exert no causal influence on us, it will seem as if the world remains unchanged. So part of what remains the same would be our consciousness. But, the sameness is not just phenomenal: similar events still follow one another as before. Even if Xs no longer cause Ys (because the modal facts have shifted), there would seem to be something like causation. Xs still follow Ys -- Xs HUMECAUSE Ys, you might say.

What is preserved if the modal facts are allowed to vary willy-nilly? And anyway, how could the modal facts matter?!

It is also epistemically possible that the imagined scenario is not genuinely possible... it certainly seems to put the Lewis-machinery through the wringer to imagine the space of possible worlds itself being reconfigured. Anyway, you might affirm the following exciting thesis: Modal facts supervene on actual facts, in which case the imagined scenario is impossible.

A technical (and probably totally opaque) note: Since the local modal neighborhood is defined by similarity, God would have to change the accessibility relation while he's at it... or something. But no doubt God could pull it off, whatever is required.

Oh, Canada...

2005-01-23T18:57:00.000-05:00

Hat tip to Evan K for his amusing commentary on the upcoming debate about polygamy... Check it out:

Heather Has (N, where N is a positive integer) Mommies

*OK, so linking to other people's blogs is a lazy, terrible excuse for blogging, but, honest, I have been really, really busy goofing off this weekend. Anyway, everyone should read evank.com all the time and this posting can be justified on the grounds that it reminds everyone of this fact.

**Goofing Off = music, reading other people's blogs, dissertating, and working up some material that responds to some of Robby G's sagacity. Neither of this weekend's projects are done. The music is still half-baked and philosophy is hard.

More Music Blogging

2005-01-20T13:54:00.000-05:00

I've been trying to blog-on with no success for a little while, so I've some old business to get out of the way before moving on to more substantial matters. To whit: a new bit of computer music... Imagine it is the 1970s and you've been listening to Ziggy Stardust, Pink Floyd's Animals, and some groovy fusion (Weather Report is so cookin', man!). Also, you are amazed at the Apollo landings and expect that 2001 is prophetic. Here is what you'd write... ahh... dig it...

It is a little less crowded than the previous experiments... one must resist the urge to be like a new cook, who characteristically puts to many exotic ingredients into his dishes.

Now what do I have to do to obtain better versions of this software, a synthesizer, and a good microphone for my guitar? ...other than, I mean, getting my Ph.D. and a job first... ahem.

Technical Note: the file is large-ish, so if you're on a PC, save to disc instead of trying to stream it. Any media player will play *.aif files, as far as I can tell.

Rob on Analysis

2005-01-19T17:24:00.000-05:00

Rob notes that maybe the psychological project is not so bad. First we cannot hope for better -- as we're in no position to distinguish between what is merely our conception of the facts and what the facts are. Second, our access to the facts is mediated by our conceptions (this is the reason for the first claim). So it seems that I was hankering after too much and my frustration was misplaced.

Imagine a scientist who wants to discover what fire is. His colleagues spend their days generating analyses of fire...

Fred: Is it really necessary that fire be hot? I can imagine a cold flame...

Sally: Maybe being fire is a historical property: you have to involve flames in the account, but they need to be non-deviantly caused by rubbing two sticks together.

Fred: I object! Some guy from the School of Forestry once told me that a fire was caused by lightning!

Sally: Whoah!... Well, that just shows that lightning is a form of stick-rubbing... as Hobbes is well-known to have claimed.

Etc.

The scientist ought to be annoyed: the method of inquiry his colleagues are using doesn't seem to be the sort of thing that ought to reveal the facts about fire. (We know it wouldn't have done the trick. Partly our justification here is empirical: look at how the nature of fire was in fact revealed: it required laboratory work and so forth [hands are waived].)

It seems that the scientist could have provided a more a priori objection: his colleagues were primarily scrutinizing their own minds rather than fire.

Rob's claims would seem out of place if they were made on behalf of the weird fire-science. Now why is that? And, if they are out of place on the behalf of weird science, then, one might have thought, they'd be out of place on behalf of metaphysics.

Of course, Rob should point out, there is a difference between metaphysics and science. I am not sure that the traditional metaphysical questions are amenable to empirical inquiry: we cannot run experiments on causation as we can on fire. Fire is amenable to science because we have a grip on it -- via experience -- independently of our conception of it.

But now I worry: it might be that our access to the facts re: perception is as it would be if we were weird fire-scientists -- which is to say: not really access at all. Their inquiry was unsuited for uncovering the world.

There is some sense in which all our access to the facts (including the facts re: the matter of science) is conception-mediated. I take it that this means something like: people with different conceptions of things will draw different conclusions about what's what. But that this is true, as I guess it probably is (at least in certain domains), doesn't excuse the scientists -- who had some independent grip on the facts (thank you experience!) -- nor does it justify the practice of the analytic metaphysician.

OK, so that is addictive

2005-01-16T18:26:00.000-05:00

Check it out:

www.umich.edu/~hughesa/Tabla4.aif

Now I have spent the last two days playing with this music authoring program. My right hand is actually numb from excessive mouse-holding... Can I also expect hairy palms? Ha ha ha... Sorry Grandma.

Expect a return to normal postings.

-Idris

How I spent my Afternoon

2005-01-15T19:03:00.000-05:00

At this rate, it is only a few years before computers will allow even the most amateur hack to ROCK YOUR FREAKIN WORLD -- viz.

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~hughesa/Master3.aif

Thank you Garage Band.

Dissertation: Analysis as a (Crap) Method

2005-01-13T14:45:00.000-05:00

The axe hanging above my head has become especially vivid of late. And so I am resolved to blog on topics relating to my dissertation. Never fear, dear reader (that would be me, as far as I can tell), I'll begin by tying the topic into some of the preoccupations of this blog as it has proceeded thusfar.

Here is the question that began my dissertation efforts: what is it to visually perceive (see) a given particular (rather than nothing at all or something else). The standard view is something like this: to visually perceive a thing is to be subject to an internal state (call it a visual experience) and for this internal state to depend in the right way (probably by being caused by the perceived thing in the right way) on the perceived thing. Thus, giving a thorough theory of visual perception requires two things: giving an account of visual experience and getting straight about the dependence relation.

There are two deep problems with this whole damn project, as far as I can tell. First, determining the right kind of dependence is difficult. Not merely difficult, but maybe essentially incompletable. The experience must depend in the right kind of way on its object. It seems that you can always say more about what this right way is -- it requires causation, for example. But it is not sufficient that the experience be caused by its object. It is further required that the experience be caused by its object in the right way. Maybe in addition it has to be caused in such a way as to counterfactually depend on some range of ways the object could be. But this is not enough: the counterfactual dependence has to be the right kind of counterfactual dependence. Sigh... It seems that the theory is essentially incompletable. If that is the case, I don't know what this means. Does it mean that there cannot be an interesting philosophical theory of perception?

The second problem is especially metaphilosophical. The standard methodology works like this: You provide an initial theory -- based on a consideration of paradigm cases of visual perception. Next, you consider the inevitable counterexamples (where these are revealed by intuition). Now try to accommodate them by refining your analysis. Repeat. (So we have the first problem. There is inductive evidence that the repetition will be endless. And this is upsetting because it is boring. The iterations don't seem to provide any special philosophical pay-off.) The problem with the methodology, other than what seems to be its essential endlessness, is that I do not have confidence that it can be expected to reveal the truth about seeing.

The worry here is that the method seems best suited to merely revealing the our (my?) conception of seeing. Call the project of revealing such a conception the psychological project. But my stance -- qua metaphysician -- is that this is not an interesting question. I want to know what seeing is, not how I/we think about seeing. Moreover, supposing that my project really is (surprise, surprise) the psychological project, it is a problem that the terms of the analysis are theoretically sophisticated terms. If our goal is to reveal our (that includes you Grandma!) conception of the facts, and our conception is limited by the concepts we possess, then it really ought to be illegitimate to give an analysis in terms like counterfactual dependence or possible worlds. Grandma don't know from counterfactual dependence and so you might think that her conception of seeing don't involve any such exotica.

I guess this is the same old post-Quinean problem. And yet many of us philosophers seem to follow a practice that looks like the psychological project. Is there a compelling solution to worries like mine that everyone but me got the memo on?

Politics: Dirty Hands

2005-01-13T11:42:00.000-05:00

Does it trouble people who vote Republican that their party has a (recent) past that included being appealing to pro-segregationist southerners -- the Dixiecrats who left the Democratic party during the civil rights movement? Now it is true that the Republicans had traditionally been better friends of the African-Americans -- representing as they did New England's merchant interests and ideology over southern agrarian interests and ideology. That counts for something. But the more recent history -- from the 60s -- seems to trump that. Moreover, the Dixiecrat tradition seems to be alive and well in the Republican party. Vote Republican and throw your hat in with the Klu Klux Klan!

So one worry about voting Republican is the following: Voting is an expressive act and, as with expressive acts generally, it is beyond the power of the individual to determine their content. Voting Republican may very well express solidarity with anti-segregationism.

Voting for Democratic candidates is similarly fraught, by the way. There is a tradition of anti-anti-communism among some Democratic constituencies. Anti-anti-communists were, as far as I can tell from the historical record, willfully blind to the mass murder typical in Stalinist dictatorships. Vote Democrat if you advocate willful blindness to the starvation/torture of millions! You jerk.

Of course, as the history of the Republican Party suggests, traditions change and with them (I guess) the expressive meaning of partisan acts. There are interesting questions, then, about the precise expressive meaning of voting one way or another here-and-now.

Quasi-Realism and Natural Language Semantics

2005-01-12T13:53:00.000-05:00

Surely this has been remarked upon elsewhere by someone clever, but if quasi-realism is committed to the view that sentences containing moral terms do not have truth-values (i.e. don't express propositions) but rather truth-like-values (i.e. express accept-o-sitions or some such), then wacky things might be expected to happen to the semantics for natural language.

Compare "Killing Rob softly with my song is fun" and "Killing Rob softly with my song is very wrong". The standard view of all of the expressions (ignoring "wrong" for the moment) in these sentences is that their meaning consists in their contribution to determining a truth-value at different situations. So, for example, the meaning of "Rob" is such as to get together with "Killing __ softly with my song" to determine a value that then gets together with "__ is fun"
to yield, as it happens, TRUE as the value.

Somehow, however, once you enter a moral term, like "wrong" into the sentence, it had better turn out (if quasi-realism is true) that these words function to contribute to determining a truth-like-value (an accept-o-sition) instead.

One way for this to happen would be if every term in the language had two semantic values: one that contributes to determining truth-values and one that contributes to determining truth-like-values. This is cool, I suppose, because it makes work for semanticists and, as we all know, idle hands are the devil's tools. The point about idle hands applies especially to semanticists, who are a motley bunch.

Another way for this to happen, I suppose, would be to retain the normal truth-determining values for terms, but for words like "wrong" to have a type-shifting semantic value: they convert truth-value-determining meanings to truth-like-value-determining meanings. They'd have to take wide-scope over the whole sentence in order to manage this trick... Actually, I am not sure that "scope" is the right term, but they'd have to be last in the computation. All the non-moral terms do their work, making a partial determination of a truth-value and then the moral terms convert this semantic value into a truth-like-value.

Opaque, no? Obviously, I need to sit down and do the math.

I might have expected that if either of the previous two possibilities were actual, then linguists would have stumbled across the quasi-realist phenomenon independently of moral philosophers.

*A third possibility, and one I suspect, not having read his book, that Gibbard advocates: There is no ambiguity. Sentences do not have truth-values in the first instance, but instead express a kind of function that in some circumstances yields a proposition (and thence a truth-value) and in other circumstances yields an accept-o-sition (and thence a truth-like-value).

Frege-Geach-Hughes: Gapping Argument

2005-01-11T15:45:00.000-05:00

I have an argument against some version of quasi-realism! Either David Velleman is wrong about Gibbard, or Gibbard is wrong about some of the facts.

David Velleman claims that Gibbard's response to the Frege-Geach problem requires that logical operators -- and I'd guess propositional operators ("believes that", "It is necessarily true that", etc.) -- be ambiguous. It goes like this: take, for example, "It is not the case that __". The standard account has it that negation expresses a function that takes a truth-value as an input and yields a truth value as an output. So, if the input is TRUE, then the output will be FALSE, and the other way around. But the Frege-Geach problem begins with noting that we can say things like the following "It is not the case that your pants are OK." If "It is not the case that __" expresses a truth-function, then this sentence ought to crash the semantic computation -- it ought to be semantically defective. It puts something that lacks a truth-value (on the Gibbardian view) into the scope of a truth-functional operator.

Gibbard's solution to the Frege-Geach problem is to generate a semantic value for moral statements that behaves like a truth-value -- it is bivalent and partitions a space of possible worlds. Gibbard's proposal aims to solve the F-G problem by providing proxies for truth-values -- i.e., truth-like-values.

Now, Velleman claims, operators like "It is not the case that ___" are going to be ambiguous on Gibbard's view. Sometimes they take truth-values as inputs and yield truth-values as outputs. Other times they take truth-like-values and yield truth-like-values.

In general, it is supposed to be a strike against a theory that it postulates ambiguity. I am not sure about that. But it clearly would be a mistake to postulate ambiguity where there is none. And I think there is reason to suppose that the postulated ambiguities don't exist.

Gapping Arguments, as they are called, can be used to test for linguistic ambiguity. If gapping is permitted in a context, then that is reason to suppose that there is no ambiguity in that context. If it is not permitted, then that is reason to suppose that there is ambiguity in that contenxt. You can gap across moral and non-moral contexts. You'll see what this stuff about gapping is all about by examining some examples.

Pardon the crude example, Grandma, but my imagination has been stunted by long exposure to undergraduates:

Claim: "Piss" (verb) is ambiguous.
Justification: "I pissed off John and into the snow." The test sentence is defective (ungrammatical) and so "pissed" is ambiguous. Gapping doesn't work here.

Consider by way of contrast "I ran into the store and then off to work." This test sentence does not show "ran" to be ambiguous. That is: it means the same thing when it takes "into the store" as an argument and when it takes "off to work" as an argument. Gapping does work here.

The Argument:

Claim: "It is false that ___" does gap when applied to moral statements and when applied to non-moral statements. So it ain't ambiguous in those contexts.
Justification: "It is false that those pants are wrong and, additionally, that 2+2 = 5." Gapping works here.

See also "I believe that 2+2 = 4; and that taking Rob's life is wrong, as well." Gapping works.

See also "I believe that 2+2 = 4 and Rob that Melissa is evil." Gapping works.

OK: so either Gibbard is wrong for having committed himself to the ambiguity claim, or he is not wrong because he isn't committed in the way Velleman claims. ...and I am a genius.

A Worry re: Ideal Responder Theory

2005-01-11T14:01:00.000-05:00

So an ideal responder would differ from me and you in various ways, while remaining similar in other ways. The ideal responder must escape our various, merely parochial, limitations if his responses are to have any normative authority. On the other hand, however, should his responses be too alien from our own, we cannot accept that his responses ground the precise values we want them to. (Evidently this responder isn't after the Tasty after all, but rather the Nasty!)

Obviously, something like an ideal responder plays a role in our thinking about value. For example, when my conscience is activated I simulate a kind of idealized version of myself to help me determine whether or not an act deserves guilt. Or when I try to determine whether or not, for example, jealousy is warranted, I try to imagine how a creature like myself -- only more sober-minded, or something -- would respond. [Shout out to Remy Debes and Rob Gressis!]

But, here is just one problem with IRTs: it can be a matter of controversy which features of myself the ideal responder must retain and which features the ideal responder must vary. Our grip on which features must vary and which must remain unchanged is to be explained by an independent grip on the values in question. Presumably, if an IRT is supposed to be a realist theory there is some fact of the matter about which features constitute the ideal responder for a given value. And these facts, if I had to guess, would require that the values in question have a status independent of the responder.

Ideal Responder Theory

2005-01-11T13:51:00.000-05:00

So here is a view about a certain kind of value -- say the kind that pleasure appears to track: what it is to be valuable in the relevant way is for it to be true that an ideal person would take a certain stance toward it. Call theories along these lines Ideal Responder Theories. One is inclined to describe the stance of the ideal person as being pleased by or as approving.

Note first that this is not a quasi-realist view: if such Ideal Responder Theory is true, then my pleasures are up for evaluation as true or false (fact-matching or not). I need only ask: does my pleasure respond to a feature of things to which an ideal responder would respond with the value-conferring response.

Note two things:

1) This account of the value could not be meant to capture the conception of value embodied in the felt character of pleasure. The reason is simple: pleasure is a conceptually undemanding state. If ideal responder theories require that our representing something as valuable in the relevant way involves possessing the concepts in terms of which the account is given, then they require too much of pleasure. I guess this is probably an obvious point. It is not meant as a criticism, but rather as a qualification on the content of the theories.

2) The temptation to describe the response of the ideal responder as approving or being pleased by should probably be resisted. The ideal responder cannot, if the account is to avoid circularity, respond to the state of affairs in question with a state like our own. That is, his response cannot represent the thing as possessing a value that warrants pleasure independent of his response. [I need an argument here, I know.] This raises the Interesting Question: what kind of response on the part of an ideal responder confers value?

The Truly Tasty

2005-01-10T17:43:00.000-05:00

It might be that aliens arrive on Earth years from now, long after our species is gone, and discover my secret stash of Ding-Dongs. (Still fresh, after all those long years!) They, like us, have chemoreceptors on their tongues and assay a taste-test of my Ding-Dongs. "Disgusting!", Thad-welk the Magnificent shrieks, and throws the delicacy to the ground. Sadly, Thad-welk is missing out on the facts. Fact is: Ding-Dongs are tasty. Obviously his tongue is broken, or something.

Why is this silly -- when a similar move regarding the wrongness of killing Rob G., is not so silly? It is no explanation to point out that our moral thinking admits dispute and correction where our thinking about tastiness does not. Instead of explaining, the previous sentence merely reports the facts. What feature of our tastiness thoughts makes attributing a cognitive failure to Thad-welk an unreasonable thing to do?

Hughes Prog: Quasi-Realism/Response-Dependence

2005-01-10T13:23:00.000-05:00

Recall the question: how are subjectivist views really any different from error theoretic accounts? The worry, of course, is just that if, for example, it is essential to a thing bearing a value that we respond -- or are disposed to respond -- to it, then our evaluative states are defective.

Now I was asked by the Daily Akratic whether or not I was ashamed, as a long-time student at the Michigan Philosophy Department, to find myself wondering about this. Daily Akratic's question barely warrants explanation, since we are all Michiganites, but, in case grandma is reading, a little explanation...

[If you're not grandma, feel free to skip ahead.]

Explanation for Grandma: Michigan is a hotbed of moral anti-realism, which is to say, a hotbed of subtle attempts to defeat the appearance (google Harman and Mackie) that our moral attitudes are in error. Allan Gibbard, were he to read my blog (!), would no doubt shake his head with mild disappointment.

Gibbard, like Simon Blackburn, advocates what has been called a quasi-realist position regarding moral attitudes. To whit: when we engage in moral thinking -- thinking for example that something is forbidden, or that guilt is warranted -- our thinking is not truth-apt. That is, moral judgment is not like belief in being susceptible to truth or falsity, nor (I'd guess) does it aspire to knowledge. So the appearance of error is explained away with the following move: the moral attitudes are not so much as candidates for epistemic error. They can't lose 'cause they ain't playing.

The standard response to the quasi-realist position is to invoke the Frege-Geach problem. Moral judgements embed in other judgments as if they were truth-apt. For example: Just as I can believe that 2+2 = 5, I can believe that murder is wrong. Also, I can believe that it is true that murder is wrong. Gibbard has some (I trust) clever counter-response involving states of hyper-decision. Whatever. I am inclined to make the Moore maneuver on responses to the Frege-Geach problem. I am dogmatically confident that something is wrong with all of that.

End Explanation for Grandma.

My main beef with quasi-realism comes from its apparent conflict with my own experience of evaluating. Evaluative states just seem intentional. I say: Save the appearances! ...even (a bit weirdly) at the cost of error theory. So, while Gibbard claims that moral attitudes ain't playing the game and therefore cannot lose, I claim that they are playing the game.

So am I ashamed to be expressing worries about subjectivist theories? Well... a little, yes. But, insofar as I am committed to a representationalist conception of most everything, I can start thinking more about the problems for such views... and ignore the Gibbardian subtlies. What do you think? So, ignore quasi-realism for the time being and focus on subjectivist theories.

True for me/Good for me

2005-01-09T13:24:00.000-05:00

Recall your irritation at hearing a student say "Well: P might not be true -- since nothing is -- but it is, at least, true for me." The problem is something like this: "true for me" doesn't pick out a kind of truth. Plausibly, then, the content of the student's assertion is just this: I believe P. And this is not news. Moreover, that they believe that P makes them bound by the norm of truth and so insofar as their claim that something is true for them is meant to be part of a package of views denying either the existence of truth or the normative force of truth their position is incoherent.

Merely believing that P, does not somehow make it so. Or, belief does not by itself create truth -- excepting the obvious truths about what is believed. The values in light of which epistemic norms are generated are not realized in the very act of believing.

The student supposes that his belief, independently of any relation to the facts (for there are none), realizes a kind of epistemic value. Because the belief is true for him he is permitted to do the normal things one does with belief: rely on it for inference, act on the basis of it, assert it publicly, not seek justifications for it, etc. I think that this would explain the intent behind claiming that P is true for him. But these practices are only intelligible (permitted) on the supposition that the belief in P is actually regulated by the aim of truth.

My hunch is that someone who claims that pleasure is intrinsically good is doing something like the student who claims -- as part of a nihilistic package of claims -- that P is true for him. And so we ought to be equally irritated... well that is a little strong. There are mitigating circumstances: like a long tradition of this kind of relativism.

Proportional Pleasure

2005-01-09T13:17:00.000-05:00

Let me amplify the point I made earlier about pleasure's being bound to track value. Notice that value comes in degrees, as does pleasure. We standardly critique pleasures not just insofar as they respond to a genuine good full stop, but also in regard to the extent to which the pleasure is proportional to the value. To be too pleased about something good can be a problem. To be insufficiently pleased by something good can be a problem. Again, though, I should note that as problems go, being more pleased than you ought to is a very small failing... but a kind of failing nonetheless.

Pleasure is bound by value-tracking norms, b'zatch!

2005-01-08T13:31:00.000-05:00

So there are several philosophical threads on which I'd like to blog for the near future. One thread will consist in follow-ups to the Hughes Program. Another, as represented in the parable of the dog, has to do with a collection of worries about our grip on value. I'd like to say a little bit more about this right now. (Sooner or later, I'd like to also do some writing on the topic of my dissertation -- i.e. how particulars are revealed in experience.)

Eventually, I'd like to say more explicitly about the Parable of the Dog, but let me begin with some background. The upshot of the Parable of the Dog, I take it, is that some class of mental states are defective in a way that parallels the way in which belief that falls short of knowledge is defective. So let me say something to indicate the kinds of mental states I'm gunning for.

Sometimes we value things -- that is, we treat things as having some kind of value. Our valuing is typically a matter of being in particular kinds of mental states. One example of such a mental state is the belief that something is good. I am more interested in states other than belief. Some examples: being pleased, being afraid of something, loving, respecting, aspiring, wanting, being prepared to pay particular amounts of money for something, preferring one thing to another, being hungry, etc.

Actually, there are many interesting differences between these states (for example: some are propositional, others not; some have a mind-to-world direction of fit and others have a world-to-mind direction of fit, some are characteristically fundamental and others derivative), but I think they are all alike in constituting ways of treating things as valuable. In what follows I'll refer to these things as evaluative states.

Let me focus on pleasure: Some folks take pleasure to be itself a source of value. That I am pleased is itself a good. This may be true (though I am not convinced), but there is something funny about extending this point to suggest that an explanation of value in a situation bottoms out in the pleasure that occurs in it. There are at least two ways in which the funniness might be brought out.

First, it is my guess that pleasure is bound by norms of goodness-tracking. That is: pleasure ought to be a response to something that is good. (Though, of course, the ought here is not a very strong one. It is not so very bad to find pleasure in, for example, watching figure skating.) If this is right, then pleasure is regulated by the norm of goodness like belief is regulated by the norm of truth.

You might run with the analogy between belief and pleasure as follows: not only is pleasure regulated by some kind of goodness-tracking norm, but, more strongly, its being so bound is constitutive of pleasure.

I think reflection on the experience of pleasure supports something along the above lines. I experience my own pleasure as a response to a value that exists independently of my being pleased. And so, in being pleased, I am in a state that represents as good that about which I seem to be pleased. So it would not be surprising that pleasure should be bound by a value-tracking norm. It is bound by a value-tracking norm because it, as it were, purports to track value. As with any purporting, responsibilities are incurred.

Post Script 1: How does pleasure represent as good?

(Difficult speculation: It is hard to say exactly how this goodness-representing occurs. It need not be that the pleasure, so to speak, says that such-and-such is good -- like a belief might. It representation is more like implicature than assertion. [see below for a wee bit more on implicature] Being pleased represents that about which I seem to be pleased as good only insofar as it is experienced as a response to goodness. So this aspect of its representational character is derivative. It depends on the pleasure having a representational character of its own.)

Post Script 2: Implicature explained for grandma

Example of Implicature: Imagine the following dialogue:

It's pouring rain, you're two hours late already, and the car gets a flat tire.
You say: "This is a fine state of affairs!"
In some sense, it is as if you had said something like "This is a terrible state of affairs!"

Though of course, what your words meant -- what let's say you strictly speaking asserted -- was that this is a fine state of affairs. Implicatures are meanings that go beyond what is strictly speaking asserted. But their doing so is (typically?) parasitic on something having been strictly speaking asserted. You have asserted that things are fine and thereby, in the obviously sucky context, implicated that things really are not fine.

Note that implicatures need not be ironic -- taking back what was asserted. What it takes to be an implicature is to be a kind of meaning that goes beyond what is asserted. Question: "Will Sally be at the meeting?" Answer: "Her car broke down." Note that the answer given does not make an assertion that answers the question, though it plausibly makes an implicature that does.

The Parable of the Dog

2005-01-07T18:35:00.000-05:00

Consider the Happy Golden Retriever: what it loves the most is to retrieve things for its master. It finds this pleasurable. Anthropomorphizing a bit: the dog would be subject to a number of evaluative states. If it reflected on its life full of fetching, it would judge its life a good one. It would aspire to retrieve. It would probably become dissatisfied with things if there were a long hiatus in fetching. Etc. To coin an expression: it would value fetching.

There is, of course, an explanation for the dog's syndrome of evaluative states: the happy golden retriever is the end result of intense selective pressures to develop animals that will assist humans in hunting. One very good way of getting them to do so is to confer a reproductive advantage on dogs that find it pleasurable to serve their masters by retrieving. Creatures tend to do what they enjoy. Of course, the happy golden retriever could have belonged to a breed that serves another purpose -- maybe it could have been a happy hound. It could, had its ancestors lived among humans with different priorities (getting dogs to run animals to ground), have found running animals to ground intensely pleasurable. Or one can imagine a breed of dogs selected to chase their own tails. Such dogs would cherish tail chasing.

Now imagine (this is a little stretch, I admit) the golden retriever becomes aware of the explanation for its evaluative states. It might think to itself as follows: I value what I do because I have been bred to do so. I could have been the result of a different breeding history
in which case I would find other things pleasurable. Our happy retriever might then, one imagines, find itself alienated from its evaluations: they will appear arbitrary in a certain way.

"Why is this so great?" it will wonder. At this point the happy retriever should find itself in a pickle, emotionally and intellectually.

Thank goodness nothing in human life is like this. For then we should be subject to something like skepticism, which (instead of showing that our beliefs fail in their aspiration to knowledge) would show some range of our evaluative states to be defective in a way similar to unwarranted belief. Now I wonder what that defect is and what the normative upshot of such an upshot would be. In the grips of the thought that I don't know P, I do not believe P. In the grips of evaluative skepticism, should I take an analogous stance? And what would that be? Etc.

The Hughes Program

2005-01-07T18:03:00.000-05:00

I've been putting together a list of what I take to be particularly irritating -- i.e. deep, central, hard -- problems for philosophers. These are problems for everyone in our field. Naturally finding these issues puzzling requires being somehow dissatisfied with the current theories... if there are such. At any rate, there is a cluster of related topics here and if the answers should turn out a particular way, then philosophy is doomed. The issues are one's I've thought need addressing, but have lacked the courage to do so.

1) How is knowledge of moral and modal facts possible?

More of the same: How is knowledge of mathematics possible?

2) What is the use of invoking abstracta in explanations -- numbers, contents, rules, properties, events, etc.?

3) How is subjectivism (projectivism, ideal observer theory, etc.) regarding some topic, different from straight error theory regarding that topic?

[I just made up the term "subjectivism"... but it ought to be fairly clear what it means (even if hard to define) -- viz. there are facts re: some topic, but those facts are constituted by our responses, or dispositions to respond, or something along those lines.]

Why don't the considerations that subjectivists use against non-subjectivist realism imply error theory rather than subjectivism?

4) What is the use of intuitions -- except as a tool for elucidating the facts about our own psychology? I take it that we could ask a similar question about conceivability arguments [If P is conceivable, then P is possible. And: if P is inconceivable, then P is impossible.], probably
motivated by similar concerns.

If you can cook up satisfactory answers to these questions, I'll bear your children... or give doing so serious thought. These questions are as yet a bit un-refined, so obviously I'd like to work on refining them. If you cannot answer them, then no children from me; but if you help me refine them or otherwise enhance the list, then you will win special merit in the eyes of God.

Beginnings

2005-01-07T17:50:00.000-05:00

My grandmother probably has her own blog at this point and I want in. I suspect that blogging shall be my entree to fame, riches, and supermodel/nobel-prize-winning girlfriends, so here it goes. I have so much to say and stuff.

I plan on posting on the things that interest me: movies, philosophy, news, the bald spot I am developing (but which I am assured is basically invisible), tasty things, my own superb soul.